


Aurora

by MoonCatcher



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Ryo the chicken hunter, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 05:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 53,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5772250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonCatcher/pseuds/MoonCatcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jin and Ryo roam about the streets of a world that has ended years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aurora

**Author's Note:**

> My NaNoWriMo 2015 project.

A short straw. Of course he was the one to draw that fucker of half the length of the other one. The long one that was now sticking out between Ryo’s thumb and index finger. At least four inches. Jin should know, he was the one who had torn them off a rotten plank lying on a heap by the wall. Drawing straws was such a bad idea to begin with. He should have known better. He was like a fucking magnet for short straws.

Jin groaned and let the wood splinter, not longer than two inches or so, fall down and land on the dirty ground under his feet. He blinked and the next moment he lost it from his sight. It didn’t matter. It had been decided.

“Fuck it, this is the third time in row. I’m either doomed, or you’ve found a way to cheat in this.”

Ryo slipped his straw in the corner of his lips, pretending to chew on it. “Look at the bright side—”

“There is one?”

“—you already have a knack for sneaking around.”

For a moment, Jin didn’t look convinced.

“Also, we haven’t seen a single Mummy for days,” Ryo went on, trying to cheer Jin up. “And we’re really close. It’s nothing like the gas station two weeks ago.”

That had been really bad. Like, fifteen-Mummies-bad. They had cornered Jin, fifteen zombie-like bodies closing up on him inside the station shop and he had hardly managed to get out of there with little of the much needed supplies he had gathered before they had appeared. He had made it back to Ryo, they had jumped in the car and driven as fast and as far as the remaining gas in the tank allowed.

They had run out of gas eventually; that was five days ago, and now they were screwed.

Jin more than Ryo, apparently.

Inside the walls of abandoned buildings, dilapidated and crumbly, yet still sort of holding together, they were as safe as they could be. Not safe enough to enjoy a peaceful, all-night sleep, or to forget about the horrors awaiting, lurking outside, sometimes just on the other side of those ruined walls, but relatively safe nevertheless. It was a feeble protection, but it was better than nothing.

With drawing the shorter straw, however, Jin was now expected to leave the illusory safety. He would have to go out, cross the street and a small lawn behind it, and get inside the opposite building. The old factory used to provide employment to a big part of the neighborhood years ago. Neither Jin nor Ryo was old enough to remember though. In their memories, Tokyo had always been a deserted wasteland. The factory had been like this, locked and abandoned, its treasures buried behind a big metal gate, for years. Instead of torrents of people flowing in from all directions every morning, they remembered only occasional Mummies, individuals or small groups, wandering around with no big interest in getting inside the factory.

There was nothing they might care about inside.

Jin and Ryo, on the other hand, were very much interested in getting behind the walls. They were quickly running out of options. Supplies were thinning.

Jin ran a hand through his hair, then pulled a hood over his head and made sure to tug it deep down into his face.

“Fine, I’m going,” he muttered, looking around and quickly considering picking up a piece of wood or looking around for a metal rod to use as a crowbar. In case he found a tough lock.

Months ago, he used to have a gun, but now without any ammo left, it was useless, forgotten at the very bottom of his bag. No more shooting locks up. He hoped to find munition inside the factory. From the surveillance they had done on the place, there was a big chance it hadn’t been looted yet. This part of the city had been evacuated a long time ago, after all, and not many people would willingly go back to areas the government declared lost. That was, of course, all the way back when there still had been a central government. Now the neighborhood was located too deep in the Mummy territory.

“I’ll go next time,” Ryo said, his voice a little breathy, like he was forcing the words out, like he was fighting with himself whether to be brave, or stay alive. In spite of his fears, though, he didn’t like seeing Jin risk all the time. “No more drawing straws. We can take turns again.” He might’ve felt a bit guilty, even though the way they did it now seemed pretty fair.

At least for now when the result would send Jin outside while Ryo would be waiting and, as the last resort, covering Jin’s back.

Jin gave him a doubting look.

“Hey, don’t try that shit on me. It’s not my fault I’m practically a half Mole, okay.” Ryo shrugged, like he often did when the topic of his aversion to go outside came up. He liked his life, as crappy as it was, and risking it by tempting his luck and promenading his sorry ass outside wasn’t on the top of his bucket list.

At that, Jin snorted. “Bite me. You’ve never seen a single Mole in your life.”

“Maybe I just didn’t tell you.”

“Yeah, right.”

Jin had known Ryo his whole life, ever since the day they had met at the foot of a scrap metal hill on the outskirts of the Central Tokyo Zone. They couldn’t have been older than five years then. They had crawled up the hill and watched the ruined wasteland that used to be a lively city all around until it had been time to hide for the night.

Logically, Ryo couldn’t be a Mole. Moles, as one of the legends surrounding them went, were a folk living underground. They had turned the sewers and abandoned train tunnels into a shelter providing protection from whatever was going on outside. In only a couple of years, supposedly, they had adapted the underground into their home and were now mostly self-sufficient. They never left to see the daylight, too afraid of the Mummies roaming freely in the now empty streets. Jin had only heard about them, a tale people in the Zone sometimes told each other, but Jin had never actually met or heard of anyone who would have personally dared searching for the underground camps. It was easy to get lost in the tunnels. Almost as easy as to cross path with the Mummies and not make it out.

For a supposed Mole, Ryo spent way too much time outside and above the ground.

Without dragging the silly argument on any longer, Jin patted Ryo’s shoulder and walked over to the door barricaded with a dust covered cabinet.

He didn’t feel like going out, but what other choice he had. They needed a car with a full tank, food, warm clothes would be nice, too, as the summer was quickly slipping into a chilly fall and neither Ryo’s sweater, nor Jin’s thick hoodie was good enough for the winter that was coming.

Jin tugged on his hood again, by now it was nothing but a nervous twitch. As if hiding his face could protect him from what might be lurking around the streets.

“Alright. Back in an hour.” And with that, Jin pulled the cabinet a little off the door, enough to get through but not to give Ryo troubles while putting it back. It was always better to be overly safe than not have a chance to be sorry later in case the Mummies caught a whiff of someone inside the building.

Outside, the early afternoon was slowly throwing shadows over the length of the wide street, once upon a time likely a pulsing vein of the neighborhood, nowadays nothing but an abandoned trough stretched between ruined skyscrapers with their holes of windows and vegetation reclaiming what people had once taken and made theirs. They didn’t need it anymore.

On Jin’s left, the street ran as far as the ocean, even though Jin couldn’t see the water from where he was standing; while on the right it was cut short by a hastily piled up barricade of cars, metal plates, rusty garbage cans, and anything that could have been found close around when the makeshift road block had been built. Possibly a decade ago, judging by the level of corrosion and mass of weed growing all over the pile, and also through it, quickly spreading all around and finding its way into cracks in the asphalt of the road. Nature was winning where humans had failed.

Jin looked around with caution, taking in every corner, every shadow, every sign of a movement, even if it turned out to be nothing but a bird or a stray page of old newspaper carried by wind. Being jumpy all the time was a part of venturing outside the high walls of Central Tokyo Zone.

For a moment, as he was moving fast across the street, Jin wondered if it hadn’t been for the better to simply go and live inside the Zone—they would be safe from the Mummies, they would have a safe place to sleep, and appropriation of food; everything they didn’t have now. They had talked about the Zone a lot at first, usually when they hadn’t been able to find a place to spend a night or had come across an already looted shop and had to take from their tiny reserves instead of adding into them. However, there was one thing the Zone couldn’t offer, a thing that, in the end, prevailed over the idea of beds and regular meals—freedom. People living in the Zone were everything but free. Everyone who walked in had become a part of a corpus; they gained a relatively safe life in exchange of their individual selves.

Both Jin and Ryo had grown up in the Zone, had lived there until they had found their way out. Neither of them was too eager to go back. It was just at moments like this, exposed to Mummies with nowhere to run, when Jin would allow his mind to even tackle the idea of the Zone and the life there.

His steps quickened, and it was only when Jin reached the small side door on the right of the gate that Jin turned over his shoulder and zeroed in on the building he knew Ryo was, with no doubt, watching him from, all nervous and twitchy at the tiniest sound coming from the outside.

After a quick examination of a corroded lock, Jin grabbed a rock lying nearby and hit the door just right to get it open. It was almost funny how easy the action was now after years of breaking into various places all around the city. Nothing outside the Zone was personal property anymore. It had been left to the Mummies, and to those who dared living in the streets.

Jin reached into the front pocket of his hoodie and grabbed a flashlight. Electricity was a long time out and all windows in the ground floor were covered with laths, drowning the space in darkness in the middle of a day.

Once inside and with the door closed behind him so nothing would give signs of his presence inside the factory, Jin started to explore. He moved with expertise, going from one room to another, scanning each with eyes following the faint beam of the flashlight. The batteries were running low; another thing he needed to find. The mental list was becoming longer: time resilient supplies, warm clothes, batteries, a portable generator would be great, too. They could’ve had everything already by now had there not been the incident at the gas station. Fucking Mummies.

Shaking his head, Jin forced himself to focus on the task at hand again. He couldn’t waste time, because Ryo was waiting for him, and Ryo might go crazy if Jin were late on his return.

Something cracked in the dark hallway behind Jin’s back.

Jin froze for a span of a heartbeat, the light coming from the flashlight quivered, then snapped and turned around after the sound. Being jumpy was something deeply rooted in human nature these days.

Nothing else happened, no more sounds coming from the hallway, and Jin returned to his work.

In the following half an hour he found a box of matches, some frozen, canned food that didn’t yet show the usual signs of being bad inside, a bottle of whisky hidden in a far corner of a metal cabinet behind a mass of rotten files. Jin put everything in a bag and moved on. The silence in the hallway was unnerving; Jin’s fingers clenched around the rough canvas of the bag. In theory, he’d already found most of what he’d hoped to find and he could turn around and go back to Ryo.

In the next room, which looked like it used to be another office, Jin halted at the threshold. The flashlight flickered around through the darkness, illuminating specks of dust soaring around—and then the beam fell on a makeshift bed in a corner. An old, shabby mattress was lying on the dirty floor. There was a pillow and a blanket, both looking like someone had been recently sleeping on them. A half burnt down candle and used dishes nearby only confirmed the thought of the place serving as a shelter.

A memory of the sound Jin had heard before made the fine hair at the back of his neck stand in alert.

Some people weren’t particularly thrilled about the concept sharing the little supplies they managed to gather. Right now it was like Jin had broken in and was stealing what wasn’t his to take. Which was, in a way, always true, but if someone really lived inside the factory, they had claimed the equipment stored there.

Jin hissed out a curse, but didn’t let go of the bag.

He had made it too far to just leave the things there. If he had to fight someone, then so be it.

The beam of light rolled over another stretch of darkness. The push to explore and find useful things was stronger than Jin’s instinct to run before whoever slept on the mattress came back and caught Jin with a bag full of essentials. At second look the room did look different from those Jin had inspected before. Dust still covered most surfaces, but the place gave obvious signs of being lived-in. The bed, candle, a simple fireplace made of a metal bucket standing in a corner. Jin noticed a book half hidden underneath the mattress. He hadn’t seen a real book in years; other than the old one Ryo always carried in his pocket and read over and over again.

Maybe whoever lived in the factory wouldn’t attack Jin. People who still cared about things like reading couldn’t be hostile to those in need…

“What are you doing?”

A low voice startled Jin; deep and just a little rough, probably due to lack of use. Different from Ryo’s—the only voice Jin was used to hearing on a regular basis.

Jin lowered the flashlight and slowly turned after the voice, his mind spinning around as he was trying to come up with a smart answer that wouldn’t start a needless fight. He wasn’t much of a fighter, just good enough to survive in abandoned streets, which wasn’t saying much. With Mummies, it was always better to run than stay and face them, and one didn’t encounter other humans often, so it was hard to tell how good Jin’s right hook might be.

“How did you get inside?”

The guy was partly standing in the shadow and Jin didn’t want to be rude and point the flashlight directly at him.

“The door.”

Jin dared moving the flashlight a bit up, revealing legs in heavy boots, tight dark pants, slender hips drowned under a thick sweater that was too big for the slim body underneath. The sweater, in spite of looking as shabby as the mattress on the floor, must have been warmer than anything Jin owned himself at the moment.

“Locked door,” the voice pointed out matter-of-factly. Jin realized he was still staring when the illuminated legs moved forward, then stopped after a couple of steps. “The front door was locked.”

“About that—”

“You broke in?” The statement came out with a gasp. “Tell me you didn’t do that.”

Jin swallowed, half expecting a first punch to come in any moment. “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know someone was here. We—my friend and I have been watching this place and it looked abandoned. Just like the rest of the neighborhood. We are miles away from the Zone, you might as well be the only person still alive around here. We couldn’t have possibly expect to find someone here.”

“You are here too. And your friend.”

“Yeah, but we move around a lot. We just, like, get stuff and move on.” Jin thought about the last time they had stayed somewhere for longer than two, three nights. Staying at one place wasn’t safe, or practical. There was always only so many supplies and resources one could gather while limited by location. Running into an old factory had looked like winning a jackpot. Only now it felt more like a waste of time, because the place wasn’t as abandoned as they had expected.

Jin’s eyes wandered down to the bag filled with supplies. The matches. The food. He and Ryo needed them.

“You took my stuff.”

“I didn’t know it was yours.” Jin’s hold on the bag was so tight his knuckles must have been white by then. “I just… we need it, really. I didn’t take much and you can walk me back to the door to make sure I won’t take anything else. I wouldn’t be doing this, but we ran into Mummies the last time we tried, and we’re out of almost everything. This neighborhood sucks big time. The factory was the only place worth checking.”

The stranger tugged at the ends of his too long sleeves in a nervous gesture as he seemed to be considering Jin’s words. The flashlight reached high enough to offer a faint outline of his jaw and chin, both partially hidden under a massive scarf wrapped around his neck.

“You ran into… _them_? Does it happen often?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious, and bordering horrified. Like one of the kids back in the Zone when Jin was little and growing up there, always waiting for adults to find a moment to sit down and tell horror stories about the stuff happening on the other side of the wall. Later, when he had found himself out there, Jin had learnt not everything was true and that most of the stories had been just that, made up stories to scare kids and stop them from leaving the Zone. Not even the most gory ones had stopped Jin, though.

“Not really. If you know your way around, you can stay away from them.”

Jin’s words met with a raised eyebrow, but then the guy’s expression turned back to the previous mix of wonder and worry. “But they found you. Before.”

“Bad luck,” Jin said, going for nonchalant but failing, or at least judging by the look he got. “We haven’t seen any Mummies around here though, so I’m not worried. Well, not about them.”

“But you _are_ worried about something.”

“I need to get back to Ryo. I’ve been out for too long.” That earned him another tilt of head as a reaction. “When we part our ways, we do it only for a limited time. I should be going back soon.”

A nod. “Or your friend will worry.”

Jin nodded, too. It was strange to talk to someone other than Ryo. There weren’t many chances for that.

Strange, but also nice, in a way.

Opposite to what he was saying, a part of Jin wanted to stay a little longer. To start over, to meet the guy properly and hopefully give a better first impression than the one that made him a burglar. They could—maybe—get to know each other even. Or Jin could bring Ryo over and they would spend a night in the factory, keep the stranger company.

Jin shook his head. “I’m really sorry.”

“You need the stuff.” Another move, a step closer, and Jin’s flashlight finally gave the whole picture. The guy was thin, would fit in the sweater three times. His hair was dark, overgrown bangs falling down his pretty face, his dark eyes narrowed against the bright light. “You should take it. It’s alright.”

“Thank you, um—” They were standing close enough to reach out and touch. Instead, Jin raised a hand and ran fingers through his hair, forgetting about the hood and pushing it back and down. His hair was a mess, with nothing to hold it in place, thick strands sprang free and stuck out in all directions. “I just… I’m Jin.”

“I… Kame.”

“Kame.” Jin rolled the name—was it a name?—on his tongue and smiled. Kame was tugging at his sleeves again, head lowered but eyes flicking up to study Jin through fluttering eyelashes. “Nice to meet you.”

Kame offered Jin a seat in a clumsy attempt of being friendly, or at least polite, and in spite of the itchy voice at the back of his mind telling him to get back to Ryo, Jin sat down on the edge of the old mattress. Kame lit some of the candles, filling the room with a faint, fluttery light. It allowed Jin to turn off the flashlight and save batteries. He silently thanked with a smile.

Kame looked at him, but before their eyes could meet, he lowered his head, busy studying his own hands.

Jin looked around, taking the room in in a bigger picture than what had been offered the beam of the flashlight. Unlike most of the ruins Jin and Ryo usually sought as their very temporary hideouts, the old factory office looked lived-in, almost warm. Like a _home_. Jin would’ve never thought to find a place like that outside the Zone, let alone tenanted by a single person. According to everything Jin had been taught and told to believe, an individual couldn’t survive outside the protective walls of the Zone.

And yet, there was Kame.

“You… live alone?” Jin asked. “It’s nice here. And safe.”

Kame shrugged. “Not safe enough. You got inside.”

“I’m not a Mummy, though.”

“No, you’re not.” Kame took a seat next to Jin, leaving enough space between them for at least another person.

When Kame didn’t say anything else, Jin waited a few breaths before speaking up again. “How long have you been here?”

“A while.” Kame gave another shrug. “The factory was intact when I came here. It has—had—” he shot Jin a sharp glance, “a lock on the door and mostly everything I need.”

Jin was glad the light wasn’t bright enough to show the little blush creeping in his cheeks when his inbreak was brought back, even though Kame didn’t sound accusing.

“Must be nice to have a place—”

Jin was cut off by a sound coming from outside the room, a sound echoing in the otherwise silent, empty hallways of the factory. A dull, cracking sound of something heavy being dragged on rough surface. Not unlike the sound that had accompanied Jin’s own entry.

Kame was immediately set on alert.

He was on his feet and moving around before Jin could’ve reacted. Jin grabbed his bag, holding on to the only valuable possession he could’ve thought of. Meanwhile, Kame stifled all candles but one, and fished out his own bag out of nowhere, obviously prepared in case of the need to leave in rush.

“We need to move,” Kame commanded.

“What—? Who is it?”

Jin tried to listen, waiting for more sounds, but with Kame moving around and his own heart banging in his chest and blood rushing in his ears, any sounds in the hallway were lost.

“The lock is gone. They— The things.” Kame’s voice trembled. “There’s nothing to stop them now.” He was halfway to the door, moving like a cat through the shadows, led by the candle in his hand. Jin added light from his flashlight. Kame was tense and nervous, shuffling his feet and straining his neck to hear more sounds, to get confirmation of his fear.

Jin knew the kind of paranoia, had seen people going crazy from expecting Mummies to break through the wall and invade the Zone, spread like the plague they were and destroy the little of humanity that had been left. It was the deep rooted anxiety of people who had lived a relatively safe life that was, abruptly, torn apart. He had been through this, too. Both Jin and Ryo had suffered nightmares for months. Ryo wouldn’t say a word, putting on a tough face, but there were still nights when he would wake up drenched in sweat, and Jin would pretend he hadn’t seen or heard anything in the morning, but would keep an extra eye on his friend for the rest of the day.

Sometimes, their roles reversed.

Now Jin did the same for Kame, watching carefully for any sign of distress.

“They don’t enter buildings,” Jin said, keeping his voice quiet, and the flashlight pointed to the floor, making sure its light wouldn’t illuminate the door. Just in case. One less detail for Kame to stress about.

But Kame was shaking his head. He clearly didn’t believe Jin’s words, and every new sound coming from the hallway made him all jumpy.

“Fine, let’s get out of here. You can spend the night with us.” Inviting a stranger to join him and Ryo wasn’t something Jin had planned, and he wasn’t sure Ryo would be fine with it, but there was no way he could leave Kame there. Jin tossed his bag over his shoulder and set off towards the door, feeling Kame following close behind him.

Jin waited before stepping outside; he leaned forward a bit, peeking out around the corner, half expecting to spot a faint light of a flashlight. Maybe Ryo had been worried enough to leave the safety of their hideout and had gone searching for Jin.

Unlikely.

Ryo might have been Jin’s best friend, as well as the only person in the whole fallen-apart world who Jin would trust with his own life, but at the same time, Ryo could be pretty skittish and fearful to voluntarily do something as bold and precarious as going out when Jin still had a couple of minutes to return in time. Ryo was, most likely, nervous and giddy right now, bouncing behind the windows, eyes glued to the factory gate across the street, waiting impatiently to see Jin.

And Jin didn’t mean to keep Ryo waiting any longer.

They would deal with Kame’s unplanned presence later. Though considering the fact that Kame hadn’t made a big deal out of Jin stealing his stuff, Jin hoped Ryo wouldn’t be too hostile. It was thanks to Kame’s kindness that they had some precious supplies now, after all.

Jin squinted his eyes in attempt to see through the darkness.

No sign of light anywhere.

Just like Jin expected.

“We need to get to the front door. It’s the shortest way,” Jin said over his shoulder. “My friend is most likely watching the street and can cover for us if necessary.”

“You said there were no…” Kame bit his lip and didn’t finish, then changed his mind. “You said you didn’t see anything dangerous around here.”

“Yeah, well, one can never be too careful, right?” With that Jin finally left the door, moving into the hallway and flashing the light around to see what was in front of him. Good thing he had a decent sense for navigation and remembered the way he had used for getting so deep into the building. The factory was a damn maze and they really needed to resurface at the side door close to the main gate.

The dull sounds were getting closer.

Kame was practically breathing at the nape of Jin’s neck, his breath ragged and hot, changing its pattern every time they heard something.

Jin forced himself not to jump on the train of fear and growing panic as well.

For someone who had grown up in the world where light was luxury and potentially dangerous, Jin sure did miss the idea of everything being illuminated, of neons shining bright at every corner, of lamps in every room, of all the ways that people used to use to tame nights and darkness but that didn’t have enough energy to sustain them anymore. Hell, it was difficult to get hands on a working flashlight outside the Zone. A lamp would have been a fucking miracle.

And miracles didn’t happen.

“Kame?” Jin stopped and listened to Kame’s heavy breaths, so close to his ear that Jin could practically feel it. “Alright?”

Kame nodded into Jin’s back.

It wasn’t convincing. Not a bit.

Something was moving in the hallway ahead of them, slow, shuffling steps that were getting closer. Jin waved the flashlight, its beam seeping through the darkness but giving no answer to what was out there.

Jin didn’t wait any longer. He took the candle Kame was holding in his shaking hand, put it down on a low cabinet on his right, and grabbing Kame’s now free hand, pulled the other forward.

“Is there a backdoor?” Jin asked.

It was clear that Kame was in no shape to go down the hallway to the main gate when that was the direction of the dull sounds. It didn’t matter what the source was—most likely just wind whooshing through a broken window and hitting a metal surface under a weird angle. An old factory like this one must have had plenty of sources of scary noises. It was a wonder Kame hadn’t gotten used to them yet, or that he had made himself a home there in the first place. But then again, what was a couple of suspicious sounds compared to relatively firm walls and a lock on the door? What was wind occasionally moaning in empty hallways and halls and distracting one’s sleep compared to cabinets filled with supplies that one didn’t have to fight for on daily basis?

Kame’s fingers tightened around Jin’s, and there was just enough light for Jin to catch the rapid twitching of Kame’s bright eyes as Kame tried to concentrate on where they were and what their options could be.

“I think… this way.”

They moved in the direction opposite to the way leading to the gate. It wasn’t a surprise.

As they holed up deeper and deeper into the maze of the factory, Jin really hoped Kame knew where they were going. Because he was pretty lost by then. Their retreat was framed by what seemed like an endless dark tunnel of walls with dilapidating paint torn off in long shreds, doors in various states of falling off the hinges, and turns with stairs leading either up or down. Jin knew the factory was quite a big complex from the outside look, but right now he was quickly getting a feeling it was too big for them to ever make it to the fading daylight again.

In addition, Kame wasn’t much of a help. He did his best at navigating Jin, but he was tense and jumpy, and every time a suspicious noise resonated through the hallway behind their back, he was heartbeats away from freezing on Jin completely.

Jin squeezed Kame’s hand.

“Here. We’re almost there.” Kame quickened his steps as they entered a door on the left. “This is the main cargo space. It has a gate leading to the loading ramp and a side door. I never use it, but it’s there.”

Jin waved the flashlight to get a sense of the space. The hall was big and empty, with racks leaning against one of the far walls. The beam followed the surface until it reached the metal gate. A faded, corroded logo of a shipping firm from a long ago was only a half readable; not many letters left to form actual words. Might have been the name of the company that used to run the factory, or maybe the carrier distributing whatever used to be made in there.

The whole country, and in general the whole world, was now full of places like this. Places that once had pulsated with life, like big manmade anthills where workers had rushed around everyday, but now lay empty and abandoned.

They followed the flashlight across the hall. A thin creak at the bottom of the gate door let in the faint afternoon light outside, and Jin breathed out in relief.

Soon he was hitting the lock with a piece of metal Kame had found lying nearby, and Kame was pointing the flashlight at it so Jin knew what he was doing. Each strike sounded like a deafening explosion in the empty hall. The lock shook and creaked with every hit. Jin missed a few times, too, shaky, as Kame’s closeness and obvious anxiety were bringing out Jin’s own bad feeling about the situation.

In between the sharp clinking of metal against metal and Jin’s quiet cursing whenever he missed the padlock, the place was quiet. Awfully so. There was no wind scratching the metal door from the outside—which kind of disproved Jin’s previous guess the sounds might have been caused by wind finding way inside the factory.

“When was the last time you went outside?” Jin asked, trying to sound casual and distract Kame from whatever he was hearing, or thinking he was hearing.

Kame swallowed. “Been a while. I— It’s not safe for me to be there.”

“High-five to that,” Jin scoffed, though his poignant tone was mostly directed to the resistant lock. “Dammit, this whole place could fall into pieces and this fucking thing would still hold together.” He hit his fingers with the next attempt and had to bite down on his lip to stop himself from crying out.

Kame must have picked up on his pain anyway, somehow. He twitched, swinging the flashlight closer to where Jin needed it.

“I told you it was a good place.”

“And it will be again.” Jin didn’t sound nearly as reassuring as he wished, but it had to do for now.

Kame’s nervousness was quickly rubbing off on Jin, and by the time the sounds that had been following them ever since Kame’s quarters were back, groaning from the dark behind their back, Jin was about as jumpy as his companion.

Kame swung the flashlight after the noise. “They are here.” His voice hitched and he bumped into Jin, who just hit the padlock one more time. Metal scraped against metal, Jin cursed some more as the piece of junk he used instead of a hammer dropped to the floor. It missed both his and Kame’s feet, luckily.

That was, however, as much luck as they were getting.

“Kame what—?”

Jin turned around. His eyes naturally followed the beam of light across the space of the hall, and his legs took a wary step backwards.

There was nothing more but silhouettes. Dark bodies moving slowly forward, their stiff legs shuffling on the dirty floor. They seemed clumsy, lumpish, like lifting their feet off the floor would require strength or will they didn’t possess. But Jin knew better. He had seen them in action. Just because their usual, almost calm, stride had given them the name—Mummies—it was just an illusion, a trick. They could be fast.

When hunting, they could be fast.

Jin cursed again, grabbed the padlock, and tugged, then again. He had heard a small crack just before the Mummies had appeared, it couldn’t take much anymore to break it.

“J-jin, I can’t—”

“Light! I can’t see what I’m doing, dammit!”

Something in Jin’s harsh tone snapped Kame back into the reality of what was important and necessary, and with the flashlight once again pointed exactly where Jin needed the light the most, it was just a matter of seconds to get the lock undone.

It also, hopefully, took Kame’s mind off the threat behind them.

They worked together to pull the door open. The opening mechanism had corroded and was tough due to the long time of no use. Who knew when was the last time someone had opened the door to load or unload a truck. Decades, possibly. The whole neighborhood looked pretty abandoned, and it might have been that way for a while now.

Just when something finally gave in and the metal moved up under their push, with an awful creaking noise that made Jin grit his teeth, Kame cried and struggled to roll outside through the small space between the door and floor their joined effort opened.

Jin followed.

He hit his knee and something had touched his shoulder, but he made it outside into the fading afternoon light. The day was cloudy

“That was close,” Jin said, standing up and watching the cranny under the door. “You alright?” He turned to Kame.

In daylight, it was the first time Jin had a chance to take a good look at the stranger he had so unexpectedly met—and who now didn’t feel like a stranger at all. That’s what an experience of a run for life in dark does to people; it brings them together. Jin frowned at the thought. He might have preferred to get to know Kame the old way. The way that wouldn’t have put their lives in danger.

Kame was pale and still a little shaky. His bag was slumped on the ground at his feet, he was hugging his torso with both arms, and couldn’t tear his eyes of the heavy metal door.

“Kame?” Jin worriedly touched Kame’s shoulder.

When he got no reply, he followed the direction that seemed to steal all Kame’s attention. From the outside, the door had the same company logo painted on as they had seen inside, only due to weather the paint looked even more battered. Jin didn’t dare to guess what the name once could have been. Probably some big company that later on had ended in dust, just like everything else.

A brand or no, things like that didn’t matter inside the Zone—and held even less significance outside.

Mummies didn’t care about brands, after all.

“Shit!”

Jin actually jumped when he registered a movement in the cranny. Something flicked in the space, and then the door resonated with another dull blow. It sounded awfully close to what a body knocking against the metal would sound. Next to Jin, Kame took a few steps backwards. Without thinking, Jin reached out and took Kame’s hand. It seemed to work before as a mean of comfort.

“We need to go. Whatever is in there is clearly trying to get us.”

“It’s _them_ ,” Kame whispered.

“It’s not the Mummies. I told you, they don’t go inside.” Or at least that was what Jin had been taught as a kid. He still remembered the lessons the adults, or older kids, had given them. And the one about hiding from Mummies inside was one of them. Later, after leaving the Zone, Jin and Ryo had made it a rule to always stop only after entering a building, never in the middle of a street.

“ _Look!_ ” Kame shot a hand up to point sharply at the door again.

Jin looked up just in time to see the first Mummy crawl clumsily under the door, its clawed hands scraping over the paved surface of the loading ramp.

“Run!” Jin cried out, dragging Kame away, and Kame had just enough time to snatch his bag with his free hand before they were jumping off the platform and running to the torn fence and broken gate leading to the street. At least there was no more locks between them and the open area where it would be easier to escape.

Jin _had_ seen a few Mummies up close in his life, but the sight would unlikely ever help him keep calm. They still looked too human to dismiss them as monsters and not care. They used to be people, with families and lives, they used to live and work in the buildings around. They used to be more than numb bodies crippling along the desolated neighborhood, their clothes shabby, their physique changed.

The infection first attacked skin, turning it rough and itchy so the infected people couldn’t help it but scratch all over. No balm would help, not beyond temporary anyway. As the infection seeped deeper, it clotted internal organs that, brain included, slowly degenerated. Once the second stage was completed, there was nothing much human left in the bodies that continued to change further. The third, final, stage started when the infection reached bones. The whole skeletal structure morphed and hardened, giving the infected claws and a visible hunch. Their new bodies could work up strength and speed while chasing a prey, but the extra effort would also exhaust them pretty fast.

The lack of stamina had become the only weakness the remaining humans could use as an advantage in the first weeks after the infection had spread worldwide and brought down most of the population. Hunting Mummies and killing them had turned out to be too much of a risk, and people had rather used their limited resources and manpower to build walls and secure themselves inside.

That was the raise of the Zones.

It was said that every big city had one, though their sizes and the number of clean population living in each differed widely.

Central Tokyo Zone, the place Jin had grown up in, was told to be one of the bigger ones. The walls had sprung up around a couple of blocks, enclosing a whole district. What once used to be a high class shopping area now housed thousands of people, most of them had never seen the other side of the wall. The Zone offered safety, and in the times like these, safety was everything most people wanted.

Jin wasn’t one of them.

And apparently, Kame wasn’t one either. Unlike anyone Jin had ever met, Kame had probably never been _inside_ the Zone. That alone was quite strange.

How could he manage to survive outside all alone and live long enough to reach his twenties, was a mystery. One Jin hoped to solve eventually—if they got back to Ryo fast enough.

To Jin’s surprise, and relief, Kame was a fast runner. Or maybe he was just really good at following orders. Or, having a bunch of Mummies chase after them was a hell of a motivation.

They made it across the street and around a corner until Jin’s lungs burnt with the need of air. Kame didn’t particularly protest switching to a slower pace either, catching a few gasps himself.

“Fucking hell,” Jin groaned, shooting a few glances over his shoulder to see how much headstart had they managed to get. No Mummies anywhere in sight yet. A relief washed over him. And as soon as the initial, pressing instinct to save his ass, and Kame’s too, partially faded, another issue came up. Jin looked at Kame, studying him. “How did you know it was the Mummies inside the factory? Did they ever get inside before?”

Kame shook his head.

Jin waited.

“No, not really,” Kame said quietly, eventually giving up and answering Jin’s questions. A previous internal struggle clear in his face. “But they are after me, so they probably watched the factory and saw you enter. You showed them the way.”

“I’m pretty sure I closed the damn door behind myself.”

Jin refused to believe he would have made such a basic mistake.

Kame was shaking his head again. “It doesn’t matter. They just needed to know where to open it.”

“Are you telling me they are—intelligent?”

The thought alone was ridiculous and went against everything Jin had ever heard about Mummies.

Kame shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s just— Shit!” He glanced up over Jin’s shoulder and saw a move at the nearest corner. Their pursuers might have not been fast, but they sure were relentless, driven by the instinct to follow and catch. Kame was freezing again, his eyes big and dilated, his breathing hard. He probably didn’t even realize he reached for Jin’s hand again, squeezing it tight. Like their connected hands meant they were going to be fine.

Fine. That was exactly Jin’s plan.

Stopping in the middle of the street had been a bad move anyway. A mistake that could cost them much more than time for conversation if the Mummies had been in the full chasing mode.

“Come on,” Jin ordered and got moving.

By now it wasn’t a surprise that Kame followed without a word, doing his best to keep up with Jin.

Then everything moved in a blur. They ran down the street, their steps heavy on the cracked concrete that used to be a busy street. Somewhere on the outskirts, long traffics of abandoned, corroding cars lined up in both directions; cars left to rot the day the infection spread in the air in the biggest blow and people understood with terrifying finality that vehicles couldn’t have taken them far enough to save them from the unknown poison. They had left the car where they had stopped, some of them already carrying the first signs of infection on their skin.

The street wound around the factory wall. From the outside, Jin knew the close surroundings pretty well after days of observation.

He had been prepared for almost every eventuality—though ending up encountering Mummies and being chased by them wasn’t anywhere near the top of the list of possible scenarios. Where the hell had they been hiding all that time?

And hiding they must have been. Really well so.

Because now the street led Jin and Kame back to the front of the factory complex, there was already the lawn visible on the right—and Kame froze. The free space in front of the factory gate wasn’t empty anymore. On the grass, at least a dozen Mummies were swaying at the spot, none of them moved forward when Jin and Kame got in sight, but from the way the rhythm of their moves changed, it was clear the two humans weren’t unnoticed.

“Oh fuck me,” Jin groaned.

It was like the fucking gas station all over again.

“Jin, I can’t do this. They _know_. They… have been waiting for me.” Kame was in shock, staring at the Mummies and clutching Jin’s hand so hard it was almost painful, but he probably wasn’t aware of his strength at the moment.

Slowly, not to draw attention, Jin tugged on Kame’s hand. “We’re almost there,” he whispered.

There was only one way out, and even that could easily lead them into a trap. The Mummies were acting strangely, like nothing Jin had ever seen or heard of. They seemed—organized. Behavior that was unheard of in the whole history since the infection had spread. They must have been capable of some kind of communication, too. Usually, Mummies operated alone, or moved in random groups of three to ten heads, but they never showed focused intention to hunt and corner.

Now, however, Jin sensed their stare and felt very much like the prey he most probably was.

“Kame?”

“Jin?” Kame turned to face Jin, and for the first time in maybe months, maybe longer, Jin saw what dread looked like. Kame was paler than before, his bottom lip trembling when he spoke. “Jin, get out of here. It’s _me_ they want.”

“Like hell am I leaving you here,” Jin hissed.

He just needed a plan. A good one. A quick one.

“Jin, please.”

“Not happening. You can say I feel responsible, okay? It’s my fault they found you.” He could reason with Kame later, explain to him that Mummies didn’t make differences between humans, or anything with a beating heart inside its chest. They smelled blood; at least that was the generally accepted theory about their behavior. No one really knew for sure, because no one ever got close enough for a long period of time to research them. People didn’t risk their lives to catch Mummies—if they encountered one, they either killed it, or died.

Jin didn’t want to think too much about which of those options was waiting for him and Kame in the following minutes.

“They knew I was inside the factory,” Kame protested, but in spite of his pouty words, he wasn’t letting go of Jin’s hand.

“And I showed them the damn door. Now, would you please shut up and let me think?”

There must have been something he could do.

All he needed was something to distract their attention long enough for him and Kame to get across the street and inside the nearest building. Then they would find a way through to find Ryo in the next block.

“But—” Kame took a breath, but never had a chance to say anything.

The distraction Jin had wished for was right there.

“HEY YOU ASSHOLES, COME AND GET ME!”

With a war cry, Ryo bolted out of the door, hands above his head and across the distance Jin couldn’t see the thing Ryo was holding. Something small and shiny when the faint sun licked its surface.

“COME ON! FUCKING MUMMIES!”

The pack on the lawn turned after the voice. Some of them moved forward, taking clumsy steps towards Ryo, grunting and groaning. Sounds Jin had never paid attention to, but now couldn’t but wonder if it really could be a form of communication between the Mummies.

Ryo put his hands down, fumbling with something out of Jin’s sight, but when Jin did get to see what was going on, he would fucking kiss Ryo if he was standing closer.

“Kame, _run_!”

Jin pulled Kame into a run. Better to get out of there. They were still chased by the group that had gone after them in the factory, but those were posing no real harm compared to the bigger group that was now, however, distracted by Ryo and the Molotov cocktail in his hand, a now burning piece of cloth flapping around the bottle mouth.

Ryo kept shouting at the Mummies, teasing them and luring them closer. Jin could understand his friend’s aversion to leave a spot that allowed him a fast retreat in case of need. The door behind Ryo’s back was open, and Ryo didn’t walk too far from there.

 

From a corner of his eye Jin noticed Ryo’s throw, the bottle drew the perfect arch through the air and landed in the middle of the gathered Mummies. The glass crashed, alcohol spilled out and soaked into the ground—everything caught fire. Flames spread around, devouring grass, sending sparks that hungrily bit down on every shred of clothing, every rag hanging on the clumsy bodies gathered around.

Low grunts filled the site, Mummies stumbled one over another in vain tries to get away. Their jerky movements were only spreading the fire further.

Jin would have stopped and watched the scene with something close to amazement, if it hadn’t been for Kame.

Jin didn’t look back then.

It didn’t matter that Ryo must have used the last bottle of alcohol they had, it didn’t matter that Ryo just set on fire the whole neighborhood and the only thing to put down the flames now would be rain. No one cared what would happen to the world outside the Zones. For most people, the world could burn down to the ground and they wouldn’t as much as blink an eye. In fact, most of them might even celebrate, since the fire would take the Mummies down as well.

“HURRY UP, AKANISHI, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY!” Ryo cried out, impatiently shuffling his feet on the dusty ground. He wanted to be inside. Wanted to hide and close the door to put a barrier between himself and the things writhing in fire. Their grunts and cries were only bound to call up more Mummies.

Just like Jin before, Ryo remembered the gas station, remembered Jin cornered by a horde of Mummies, their clawed feet scratching the floor as they had chased Jin around the shop and then also outside, around empty gas tanks and abandoned vehicles, and when Jin had finally slipped in the passenger seat and shouted at Ryo breathlessly to get them the fuck away, Ryo had never in his life stepped on the gas pedal faster. The old engine had roared and the car had taken them away. In the rear mirror, Jin had seen some of the Mummies breaking into run, but their stamina could never lasted long enough to match a car.

With Ryo’s croaked voice cheering for them, Jin and Kame eventually found themselves inside the corner building. Jin grabbed the first big enough object to block the broken window they used as an access point, and Kame helped push an old, rusty bathtub to the place to hold the board against the wall.

“I can’t believe Ryo did that,” Jin said, taking a minute to catch his breath after the run. His legs were shaky and his whole body was tingling with the lack of oxygen, his heart was pounding hard up in his throat. For someone who was always on the run, he was awfully out of shape. Not really the type to join a marathon, or a sprint competition.

He bent forward, hugging his middle with both hands, and closed his eyes. The need to gasp for air was slowly fading and his breathing pattern was returning to normal.

Kame was quiet, and after a moment Jin glanced up to check on the other.

Kame stood a couple steps aside, staring at the board that now served as a barrier between in and out. It was hardly a match to the sturdy walls of the factory, or its metal doors and gates, or heavy shutters covering the windows.

But it had to do for now, anyway.

Sensing Jin’s eyes on him, Kame turned around. “Was that your friend? Is he going to be alright?”

“Of course. He’s probably already inside, cursing me, because to save me—us, he had to use what was left of our booze. Good thing I took some in the factory.” Jin grinned. He felt much better now.

Of course, spending the night anywhere around here was no longer an option. The pungent smell of fire and burning bodies found its way also inside, and it was only a matter of minutes until the flames jumped on the trees and then also walls. The sky might be steel gray and hanging low, but that didn’t mean rain would come any time soon. The sky was rarely different these days, after all.

Kame gave him a wry smile, but then surprised Jin by moving to gather both their bags and handing one to Jin.

“We should go check on him. And bring him some booze. He may need it.”

Jin grinned.

“He will like you.”

They picked up their bags and Jin carefully tucked the flashlight into a pocket. After having left the factory in hurry, there hadn’t been time to take care of it, and with a line of windows on the front wall now, there was enough light for them to see where they were heading. The floor was covered with garbage, dust, and even some moss and weed growing out of the rotten, wooden floor and damp carpet. The glass in the windows had dirt stuck all over, but only a few panels seemed to be broken.

Taking careful steps, Jin was making his way across the hall to a kicked-out door at the other end. Kame followed right behind him, occasionally making small hissing sounds, probably when he stepped on something extra moist or spongy.

“You don’t sleep at places like this, do you?” Kame asked eventually.

The sheer disgust in his voice made Jin chuckle. “Not everyone hits the jackpot with a luxurious, well-preserved factory building, you know? The rest of us must improvise.”

Kame was quiet for a moment. Jin imagined him imagining spending a night at a place like this.

“But no, we’re not sleeping here tonight. Or any other night.” Jin took a pity of Kame in the end. “It’s dangerous, and also gross. The higher floors might be better, if the roof didn’t cave in yet, but we can’t stay here anyway.”

Kame nodded, more to himself. “The fire.”

“Exactly.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay here. If they hadn’t caught my scent, your friend wouldn’t have needed to start the fire.”

“Hey, none of that,” Jin cut him short.

Kame lowered his head and nodded again.

It took them a while to find a way through the piled up garbage and a collapsed inner wall. Old plastic tables and broken chairs were scattered around, giving an idea that the place used to serve as some sort of business establishment, a restaurant, or a fast-food place. Small plastic balls of faded colors covered a corner of one of the rooms, and Jin was tempted to take one.

“Jesus Christ, Akanishi, what the fuck was _that_?”

Jin heard Ryo before he saw him. He gave Kame an assuring smile over his shoulder, and then walked into the next room. Now, that looked familiar.

When he had been leaving a little over an hour ago, he had had no idea what had been waiting for him.

“Thanks for saving my ass,” Jin grinned.

Ryo threw himself at Jin, arms flapping and wrapping around Jin’s neck, he held tight like he might never let go. Ryo didn’t say anything else, swallowing back sobs of relief. For a while, he thought he would never see Jin again and it was like a nightmare.

“You,” Ryo sobbed.

The tight grip on Jin gradually morphed into Ryo repeatedly hitting Jin’s back and shoulders with clenched fists.

“You asshole! Don’t you ever _dare_ doing it again!”

“What— I didn’t do anything.” Jin stood there, letting Ryo release the tension and fear. Ryo had been fine after the gas station, as fine as he could have been, considering the nightmares that had plagued his dreams afterwards, but he hadn’t been trying to beat Jin to death back then. “Ryo… Ryo, come on, I’m fine. We are fine.” Jin held Ryo’s shoulders and carefully peeled the other off of himself. Ryo’s face was twisted with anger and pain, his eyes flickered all over Jin before landing on Kame.

“Who—”

Jin stepped back. “That’s Kame. Turned out there was more than supplies inside the factory.”

Ryo groaned. “I should have known you would risk _both_ our lives for a pretty boy someday.” He didn’t say it loud, but Kame probably heard it anyway. Jin didn’t dare looking to make sure.

“Shut up,” he hissed.

With everything that had happened since the moment he had left the hideout, there had been hardly time for Jin to stop and take a good look at Kame. It was either too dark, or too many things happening. To many Mummies going after them.

After Kame.

The thought wasn’t a conscious one. Logically, even in the light of the new findings, like that Mummies might be really able to communicate with each other, Jin still refused to accept that Mummies, generally considered brainless, might have an agenda—and that their agenda, of all things, would be searching for and finding a young man living all alone in the middle of the wasteland that used to be Tokyo.

Ryo nudged Jin, winking at him meaningfully, but finally also pulled away and took a step towards Kame.

“I’m Ryo.”

“Kame.”

“Nice to meet you. I hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into by joining this idiot.”

Kame did his best to smile, but the sudden attention and Ryo’s easy, friendly act was making him nervous, dragging out his shy side that wasn’t used to social interaction of any kind, the less a friendly one.

“We didn’t really have another choice, Ryo,” Jin explained, saving Kame from having to form answers that would be more than a few words long. “Fucking Mummies got _inside_ the factory.”

“Inside? You kidding!”

“Not in the slightest. Weird, right?” Jin wasn’t really up to mentioning Kame’s theory, but he also knew there was only so much time he could keep that bit secret from Ryo for.

It didn’t make any sense—not to tell Ryo, because the two of them had always talked about everything, but Jin kept quiet about it anyway. So what. Maybe it was a coincidence, an accident that had brought them inside the factory. Or maybe Mummies didn’t mind enclosed spaces at all and people just never saw them entering buildings. If that was the case, Ryo would just laugh at Jin eventually. Nothing but wrong timing. Anything was possible. There was no such thing as exact science concerning Mummies, after all. It was difficult to study them when no one dared getting closer.

And if—the _if_ being big and shiny and almost nonexistent—Kame was right and the Mummies were after him, Ryo might panic. Ryo might want for Kame to go away.

Jin couldn’t allow that.

Jin hoped Kame would stay with them. At least for a while.

“Fucking weird,” Ryo nodded, looking between Jin and Kame, as if one of them could offer an explanation that his brain demanded at the moment. “I don’t think we ever—”

“Nope,” Jin assisted, “we never saw them inside.”

“Nice. Then I hope you understand we’re not staying here another minute. Gotta get the fuck out of here, Jin.”

“Agreed.”

No one moved though. If it had been just the two of them, Ryo would have been already furiously packing his bag and they would have been on the move in a moment. However, they weren’t alone—Jin had brought a stranger along, and so far they all had been too occupied with Mummies to stop and decide on what should happen with Kame.

Kame had said it, if not directly, then everything about his behavior was clearly stating that he liked his settled, safe way of life. He liked walls and locks on doors, liked his store room full of supplies—god, he had a bed and other stuff people considered _a home_.

And now it was gone. Maybe not yet consumed by flames, but Mummies knew their way inside, and Kame couldn’t go back.

All that was left of his life before Jin had burst into it, was the few things Jin had stolen during his unintentional break-in and the bag Kame had brought along, probably stuffed with a few essentials.

“Kame?” Jin started in a low voice, turning to Kame and trying to read his blank expression. “Do you… Would you like to go with us?”

“Go—where?”

“First of all, _away_ ,” Ryo said, impatience kicking in. “Then we’ll see.”

Uncertainly, Kame looked at Jin. He was confused and a little lost, and things had been so much easier when Jin had held his hand and told him what to do and where to go.

“We can’t stay here,” Jin explained calmly. He stepped closer, but didn’t reach out to make any physical contact with Kame. “There’s the fire, and if it didn’t kill all the Mummies around, the rest will be pretty pissed off. I don’t know how about you, but Ryo and I could really do with some shut eye tonight.”

“And some booze,” Ryo threw in, grinning.

“Right. Things like… this,” Jin waved in a general direction of the front windows illuminated by the fire outside, “that doesn’t happen everyday—”

“Luckily.”

“And Ryo is practically a half-Mole, so for him coming outside and attacking the Mummies has been a huge thing—”

Ryo pouted. “You can mock me all you want, Akanishi, but you will see someday. The Moles are our future, not the fucking dictatorship in the Zones. They are as real as you or me, or your pretty boy here.”

Listening to the short exchange, Kame got lost for a completely different reason that had a little to do with the fact that his secure life had been just blown into pieces. He understood about a half of what Jin and Ryo were talking about.

“What do you say?” Jin smiled.

And Kame melted. “You said it yourself, I can’t stay here.”

 

**

 

Leaving the burning neighborhood behind, they went south. The smell of fire and roasted flesh was strong in the air for a long time, like a ghost following them and reminding them of what they had left behind. It made Ryo sick, and Kame was even paler than before. Jin didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the stench in the air drew all color off Kame’s cheeks.

Jin kept one eye on Kame who was walking a little behind, head lowered and lips pressed tightly together. He was thinking; Jin could only guess the direction of those thoughts—the things Kame had lost, the possible dangers awaiting ahead in the unknown, joining strangers who, for all Kame knew, were nothing but thieves.

Jin didn’t consider himself a thief though. Yes, he did break in places and took whatever useful he found there. Yes, he had kicked out his share of doors and had broken a number of windows in order to gain access to various properties around the city. But who was to come back for those things? The previous owners had either fallen victims to the infection and turned into Mummies, or had left and had built a new life in the Zone.

Had they cared about their possessions at all, they had no means to come back to get them. Jin and Ryo, on the other hand, cared a lot. For them some of those things meant the difference between hunger and a dinner, freezing to death at night and having an extra blanket to hide under. A place to sleep. A safe hideout from Mummies roaming in the streets outside.

Ryo was the one leading the way now. Sometimes Jin thought Ryo actually had a plan where to go that he just hadn’t shared with Jin yet.

“With all this walking, I might not be surprised if we eventually run into the Moles for real,” Jin said loud enough for Ryo to hear him.

“Told you that’s been the plan all along.”

Jin’s mockery left Ryo unfazed at best. It was the kind of conversation they often engaged in to pass time.

“And your inner Mole radar is telling you to drag us to the other end of this fucked up city?”

“Not really. But my ‘inner Mole radar’ is telling me we are close.”

Jin didn’t bother with a reaction, and they fell back into a somewhat comfortable silence that often stretched between them during moving from one place to another. Sometimes there just wasn’t anything to say. They had learnt to go for weeks with nothing but minimum conversation, their words limited to only necessary exchanges of suggestions and agreements about a place to stay or street turns to take next.

After a few minutes, Jin sensed a presence by his side, and to his surprise, Kame had caught up with him.

“What’s a Mole?”

Jin looked at Kame with a mild puzzlement. _Everyone_ knew the stories.

Some believed them more than others, some didn’t believe at all. But everyone had heard them in one form or another at least once.

For someone to grow up without an idea of the mythical underground folk living, presumably, somewhere in the Tokyo underground, such a person had to never step foot in the Zone. The person must have spent their whole life in separation out in the open, in the streets and decaying structures of the city.

But then, the memory of the factory, of the way it looked so much like someone’s—Kame’s—home, was all Jin needed to understand that Kame might have been the person.

It was amazing he had made it long enough to meet Jin.

Jin shrugged, tugging on the strap of his bag hanging over his shoulder.

“It’s a story. One of those stories people in the Zone tell because most of them had never dared stepping outside. They don’t know what’s out there—here, so they make up tales about other groups of people surviving.” Jin sure had heard a couple of stories when he was a kid. “A lot of younger people in the Zone have never even seen a Mummy in their life. They know about them only because olders talk.”

Kame seemed to think about it for a moment, then nodded. “Ryo believes they are real?”

“Yeah, well, Ryo believes in many things; Moles just happen to be one of them. It’s a matter of hope, I guess.”

“But you don’t believe there are Moles somewhere in the old sewers or elsewhere.” It was a statement this time, Kame wasn’t asking.

“No. Not really. I mean, it would be cool if they existed, but Ryo and I have been out here for years and we never ran into one.”

“It’s just hard to find them, okay?” Ryo shouted, giving away he had been listening to them all this time.

Jin rolled his eyes. “Lucky us then, we have you and your Mole radar!”

“Shut up.”

Jin grinned, and something about it made Kame crack a smile.

“How come you don’t know about Moles?” Jin left Ryo walking ahead again. Radar or not, Ryo’s steps were sure and so far hadn’t led them into another Mummy encounter. So that was a good thing. Jin didn’t think either of them was in any way prepared to face Mummies again, today or any time soon.

“I don’t know. Just never heard of them, I guess.” Kame didn’t look at Jin this time.

They followed Ryo across the street, around a heap of crashed cars and more vegetation thriving in the cracked asphalt. It was strange to imagine what the place, the whole city, looked like three decades ago before the infection had broken out.

“Probably never lived in the Zone either, huh?”

“I… no.” The simple word was accompanied by a little head shake. “My— The people who raised me thought the Zone wasn’t safe.”

“Smart folks!” Ryo remarked without slowing his steps or looking over his shoulder.

Kame gave Jin an inquiring look.

“It depends, really. The Zones have walls and resources. They can take care of the people living inside. They can provide a place to stay, food. A sense of belonging. In the Zone, people are not alone. There’s a social structure,” Jin enumerated. Ryo’s shoulders shook with a scoff at each article, but Jin didn’t comment on that. It would be just adding oil to the fire of Ryo’s mockery. “After the infection broke out, people herded together to face the danger. It was the best they could do, probably.”

It was something Jin knew only from stories told by adults, by people who had lived through it, had been there at the beginning when the world had fallen in chaos. When there yet hadn’t been walls to hide behind and people had been dying simply because they had been alone.

“Yeah, only those initial shelters quickly turned into fucking dictatorships,” Ryo groaned. The topic was like a sore spot he could ignore for a while but once poked, the pain and irritation flared up all over again. “The Central Tokyo one sure did.”

“Is that why you two left?” Kame asked.

“Pretty much.”

“That, and other things,” Jin added to Ryo’s sharp reply.

“Like finding the Moles.”

That finally prompted Ryo to stop and turn around. “I like this guy,” he grinned.

“What about you? How have you survived all this time?” With Ryo listening, Jin couldn’t voice out the second part of his question. The one he was curious about more than anything. He couldn’t ask Kame how had could have survived in the streets when Mummies seemed to take such a great interest in him. Living outside the Zone was tough enough when Mummies didn’t do the unimaginable to get to you, when they stopped at the door while chasing you, when they didn’t communicate among themselves and didn’t flock together to greatly outnumber their prey or to cover all exits and escape routes. Kame lived with all of that—and survived.

A flicker of understanding went over Kame’s face.

“I used to have people taking care of me. A small community, if you want to name it. We lived alone in empty houses around the city, and when we moved on, we found another place. Not often. We liked to stay somewhere for as long as we could.” Kame spoke slowly, with a haze of memories veiling the words. “It’s been a couple of years since Hitomi died. She was the last one alive. By then I was the one taking care of her.”

It was the most Kame had said since the moment they had met.

“Must have been hard to watch them all go.”

“They were like family,” Kame mumbled. “Without them, I was alone. Good thing Hitomi and Daniel taught me things.”

“But they never mentioned the Moles,” Ryo prodded.

Jin sighed. “Excuse him, he’s obsessed.”

“Like I said, we lived alone, minded our own business. No one wanted to jeopardize it by searching for other… groups. There was no guarantee such an encounter wouldn’t go wrong.”

“The Moles aren’t dangerous though.” Ryo slipped past another crashed car, passed by a bus rolled on its side and obstructing the way, then stopped and waited for Kame and Jin to climb through the narrow space between the front of the vehicle and a building. The ground was lost under layers of broken glass, vegetation and rotten lumps of something that might have once been clothes. Better not to examine it too closely. “They are scientists.”

Jin helped Kame climb over the mess. Some parts were slippery, there were visible spots where Ryo’s foot had slid on the top layer of the muddy deposit. Kame moved carefully forward. When his knees went weak and he froze, afraid to take the next step, Jin reached out and held his hand to guide him the rest of the way.

Once again on a firm ground, Kame bent forward to take a few deep breaths. He looked tired, the events of the afternoon and now quickly falling evening finally dawning on him. Jin was used to long walks through the empty, dilapidating city, but he could understand how exhausting it could be for someone whose lifestyle was different.

Jin touched Kame’s back, giving Kame a gentle rub. “Alright?”

“I think so.”

In spite of those words, Kame didn’t look alright. Jin glared at Ryo, and the moment their eyes met, Jin minutely shook his head, giving Ryo a sign that it was about time to set a camp for the night.

One look at Kame and Ryo understood.

“Fine, guys. I think the building over there is calling our names,” Ryo said, pointing at a house at the end of the street. It was lower than the rest of the buildings in the area. Two storeys tall with balconies and a roof overflowing with greenery. A part of the southern end had collapsed, but the fallen debris didn’t seem to leave a gaping hole in the rooms inside. It wasn’t the best conserved place around, but the main door was still in place and could be closed, and most of the windows looked intact as well.

Ryo had a nose for finding safe shelters. Jin had learnt there was no reason to argue about whatever place Ryo picked for the night. It always turned out right.

As they neared the entrance, more details cleared out for them to notice. Small things, more or less wasted reminders of human presence and lives that had once brought the place to life. A broken drying rack half buried under a pile of debris, a plastic bicycle for kids lacking the front wheel, an old suitcase, open and empty, abandoned by whoever had packed it and taken it along, without ever making it farther than outside the door.

Jin hated seeing those little, personal items more than anything. He could deal with rusty train waggons, with demolished buildings, with vegetation quickly taking over once busy streets, with fading signs and logos of companies that no longer mattered and he had no connection to them. The world had turned upside down and not even Japan had been spared. Hell, he could even deal with Mummies wandering the streets, their empty stares and deformed bodies, their sinister claws and threatening grunts. He had learnt to run and hide, to see the world as it was now without deceiving memories and dreams of the world that once had been. Jin wasn’t a dreamer, he saw things realistically—he didn’t hide behind stories about a safe community of people who would eventually save the world like Ryo. The world was a mess. And it was unlikely to change.

The thing was, seeing broken toys and deserted homes, dust covered shelves with things that used to mean everything to someone who had lived there, all those were like worms chewing their way deep into his brain and memories, bringing to life his imagination.

And maybe, just maybe some of those worms occasionally managed to plant a seed of wanting it all. Wanting a place to live, somewhere safe that he wouldn’t have to leave after three, four nights. A place that he could call home.

A part of him wanted more than four walls and a lock on the door. A small, deep buried part of Jin sometimes dared wanting also something else. Something similar to the glimpses of normalcy of different times he had seen in the factory. A bed. Little things he could call _his_. A place to keep it all in and be able to come back.

Shaking off the thoughts, Jin quickly walked past the bicycle and jogged up a couple of crumbling stairs leading up to the entry door.

“First we check it out, find the best suitable place to set up the camp. We need a secure spot to start a fire without burning this whole thing down.”

“Roger that,” Ryo shot back over his shoulder, already moving in and setting off to search the ground floor.

They had a pattern for how to do this. No matter what place they found for a night, the requirements were always the same. Something small and closed, preferably with door that could be locked, and if that couldn’t be an option for some reason, a big piece of furniture lying around would work too. As long as the thing wasn’t completely rotted away and could be used to block the door. Windows weren’t necessary, though Jin had a long time ago decided it was kind of nice to wake up to a faint light of the sun pouring into a room through windows.

Now, however, with the experience of having a bunch of Mummies chasing him inside a building, Jin stroke out any and all rooms with windows in the first floor. Waking up to sunlight and Mummies crawling in through windows were two different experiences, and Jin really hoped they would be spared the latter one.

“Come on,” Jin said, and Kame followed him to a staircase on the left that was going up to the upper floor.

“Are we staying here?”

“I think so. The place looks good.”

There was about ten steps to the first platform where the stairs turned right and went on up. The whole floor was littered with dust, dirt, and shreds of plaster that had fallen off the walls around.

Ascending the staircase, Jin was taking careful steps and ever so often warned Kame about a tricky spot where there was a higher danger of slipping.

The second floor started with an open hall. On the right, trees growing outside had branched in through big windows and let rain and humidity soak the carpet spreading all over the floor. Mold crawled up the nearest wall. The air was heavy and stiff.

A couple of doors opened into adjacent rooms. Some of them were left empty and strangely depressing, with holes in the walls where electric outlets once used to be, now nothing but brushes of chewed off wires stuck out, instead of framed pictures or wallpapers the walls were sprayed, offering mournful messages of those who had been in there before. A strange mix of Japanese and Latin letters was shouting at possible visitors to stay away, to hide, to pray to any and all gods because the end of the world had come.

It took Jin a moment to notice that Kame wasn’t right behind him like he usually was. While Jin was reading graffiti and telling himself it wasn’t a shiver running down his spine he just felt, Kame had sneaked away and quietly padded across the hall to another door. Jin found him moments later frozen in the doorframe.

When Jin touched his shoulder, Kame startled, shifting away from Jin with a nervous twitch.

“Hey,” Jin smiled. He needed to remember Kame wasn’t used to having someone around. “Alright?”

Kame shook his head, dark hair falling down his face and he didn’t move to push it away. He was frowning, his eyes roaming around the small room without really seeing it.

Upon a quick check, there wasn’t much to see. The room was about the same space as those Jin had seen a moment ago, only this one had a corroded simple bed frame twisted at the wall under the window, and what was left of wallpapers was decorated with faded kid drawings, simple and clumsy lines forming hardly distinguishable shapes. Blue trees and a house, brown stars all around, and little bit aside a group of small stick figures standing by a round hill.

Jin sighed. Great, more proof of little kids that used to live here—and the next inevitable question didn’t take long to push its way into his head. What had happened to whoever had drawn this? Had their parents taken them to safety in time? Had they died? Or worse… No one had ever seen child Mummies, not that Jin knew about, so maybe the author of the drawing had been spared the fate of being turned into a brainless body.

“Kame? You can’t think too much about it,” Jin said, seeing the blank shock in Kame’s face. “There are places like this everywhere. You must have seen some, too—”

“I have seen _this one_ ,” Kame finally said.

He squatted down in front of the wall, reached out and let the tips of his fingers brush the drawing, tracing the shaky lines.

First Jin noted the strange melancholy that gripped Kame’s shoulders, made him tense, unaware of the world around. It was the kind of stupor that had overwhelmed both him and Ryo the moment they had gotten out of the Zone wall and looked back at what they had been leaving for the last time.

Kame turned his head, meeting Jin’s worried look.

“I was the one drawing this,” he whispered. “Before. We lived here. I think Hitomi found it. We needed a new place to stay and she ran into it by accident. I didn’t recognize it at first, it’s been a while. I was maybe four or five, I think.” His eyes were huge as he was looking around, taking in the whole room with every single detail. “Is it strange that I don’t remember leaving?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“It was.”

Jin didn’t know what to say. He listened to Kame, but the content of those words was difficult to believe.

Of all buildings in the neighborhood, Ryo had picked this one.

“You won’t fucking believe it!” Gasping, Ryo flew up the stairs and stumbled across the hall, nearly falling through the door. He gripped the doorframe, heaving and trying to catch his breath, like his previous shout had robbed him of the ability to speak, as well as sucked all air out of his lungs. “There is running water downstairs! I haven’t seen a working faucet since… Fuck, I don’t remember _ever_ seeing one! Geez, this place is amazing—”

“Ryo.”

“You gotta see the kitchen in the back. It’s almost intact, dude. I mean, fucking running water! When was the last time you saw that? I don’t think we would have the same luck with gas, though, so someone still needs to set up a fireplace,” Ryo rambled on, gasping words out between heavy breaths. He looked like the only thing holding him from collapsing on the floor were his fingers clutching the brittle wood of the frame. “Now I wonder about showers.”

“RYO!” Jin hissed louder, his head jerking in the direction where Kame was once again lost in the drawing, as if trying to understand it was still there, had survived all those years and weather and humidity.

The raised voice sobered Ryo up. “What,” he snapped, popping eyes at Jin in irritation and a wordless question.

“Calm down.” Jin was pretty excited about Ryo’s findings himself and any other day he would have left everything be and ran downstairs to see the wonders with his own eyes. In a city that had collapsed decades ago, a place with running water and working pipes was close to a miracle. But right now he needed to make sure Kame was alright.

Ryo bounced, then finally noticed Kame—and his demeanour took a U-turn. He froze in place, like there had been a switch someplace on him that had been pushed into the opposite pole. “Did something happen?”

“Not really.”

Ryo clearly didn’t believe him.

Kame inhaled deeply, composing himself. “I’m fine. It’s just a weird coincidence that we are here.”

Ryo still didn’t get it. He turned to Jin for some explanation.

And he got one. “We just found out that Kame used to live here.”

“Really?” Ryo raised a brow.

Kame nodded, added a little, probably unconscious shrug, and Jin wondered if his sudden lack of speech was because he didn’t want to share the memories with Ryo, or because sharing them with Jin just now had exceeded Kame’s ability to keep himself together while reminiscing. It might have been either—or both. Jin wouldn’t be surprised.

It had been only a couple of hours since they met, but it felt much longer. Time got screwed when you were chased by Mummies, then set a neighborhood on fire and spent the rest of the day walking in hope to find a safe place to sleep.

“Fine,” Jin clapped his hands together. “What if we go check the kitchen and see what’s hidden in this magical bag?” He grabbed the bag with things he had gathered around the factory. The bottle of alcohol would sure come handy today.

Ryo didn’t protest. He sent one last suspicious look to Kame, then swayed on his feet back and forth over the half broken threshold. With a shrug, Ryo spinned around and bounced down the stairs. With all the wonders of a long lost modern world, it wasn’t surprising that Ryo’s attention was lured elsewhere, away from the gloomy ghosts of Kame’s past looming among the walls.

When about ten minutes later Kame and Jin arrived downstairs, Kame still a bit shaken, but having some color slowly return to his face, Ryo had already begun dinner preparations.

Being constantly on the move had its pros and cons. First of all, most importantly, it kept them safe. Now with the knowledge of Mummies being possibly intelligent to a certain level, moving around had become essential. It didn’t leave any room for being watched, studied, and eventually attacked at the most inconvenient moment. Being on the move also meant more chances to find food. Searching shops and kitchens abandoned twenty years ago could be gross at times, with mold swallowing everything and turning perishables into dust, with rain water finding its way through building structures and destroying what animals and insects hadn’t already taken care of. However, sometimes such searches brought fruits—intact packs of dried food with packaging firm enough so rodents hadn’t managed to get to it first yet, water in plastic bottles and containers, and during summers, wildly growing greenery would give a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Ryo dusted off a long kitchen counter, then whipped it clean with water from a nearby sink. With the luxury of running water, the temptation to for once eat in a somewhat civilized matter was too big. On the clean surface Ryo lined up a selection of packs with dried food, and after what Jin guessed must have been some serious considering, added also three out of the four Twinkie bars they had left.

Finding still edible snacks and sweets was about as much of a miracle as having a working faucet.

They ate, sharing bites of different kinds of food, Jin and Ryo discussing plans for the following day. The question about Kame possibly joining them for good was left unspoken. If it came down to it, Jin wouldn’t particularly mind Kame’s presence in the future.

If Ryo didn’t look equally open to such an option, it was mostly just because of his natural distrust of new things and rapid changes.

A bit odd for someone who had ditched everything he had known and left what was meant to be the only safety on this damned planet, and had joined Jin on the run out of the Central Tokyo Zone.

After dinner it was time to empty the bag of Jin’s factory haul and see what was inside.

Jin smiled at Kame who was watching the content roll out of the duffel onto the cleaned up counter. Jin first carefully took out the bottle of whisky, grinning at Ryo as he placed it to the middle of the counter, like an award after the long, hard day they had had.

“Now, this is something I like to see,” Ryo beamed, turned around and frolicked around the cupboards lined up against a wall until he found what he was looking for. Three glasses landed on the counter expectantly.

Jin laughed. “I knew you’d appreciate this one.”

“Even more now when the rest of our last bottle ended up being a fuel to a fucking Mummy cremation.”

Kame winced at the remark, but otherwise stayed quiet, like most of the evening.

Maybe Ryo wouldn’t be against having Kame around, since having Kame around didn’t seem to be too much of a change from what Ryo and Jin were used to.

“Hey, that was pretty awesome, actually. I mean, besides being scary as fuck and kind of gross, if you think about it.”

Jin poured whisky into each glass.

“Better not to think about it too much then.” Ryo took one glass and turned it bottom up down his throat. It burnt and he coughed, but otherwise looked completely smitten and blissed. “Whoa, Akanishi, this is some really good stuff.”

“You say that about everything with alcohol in it.”

“But only because it’s true.”

Jin refilled Ryo’s glass. There were times to save, and then there were times to say screw it all and have some fun, enjoy the little things life offered.

There would be other whisky bottles in the future.

“Here’s to tasty alcohol,” Jin toasted, then changed his mind. “And to meeting new friends.” He smiled at Kame.

“To drinking with new friends,” Ryo almost echoed, changing the words to his liking.

Kame brushed his finger down the glass standing in front of him, then lowered his head. “Thank you, but I… I don’t really drink.”

“Never mind, more left for me,” Ryo laughed, finishing his second glass and then also Kame’s. He sat there, eyes closed, savoring the taste.

Amused, Jin shook his head.

Despite his moans of pleasure at the heavy, smoky taste left at the back of their throat, Ryo refused another glass, muttering something about leaving some for later. A few minutes later Ryo excused himself, saying he would sacrifice himself and go try whether or not the pipes worked also in the showers. The expectations were high.

Jin, too, hoped they would be lucky. No doubt they deserved it today.

While Ryo was away, Kame helped Jin sort out the things from the bag.

“I almost wish I had had time to take more,” Jin sighed, putting all packed food on one pile. There was some chicken curry, veggies, macaroni and cheese, and a couple packages of powdered soups.

Kame gave him a look.

Jin met it with an innocent one. “Come on, in the end it’s a good thing I stole all these things. It would have been a waste to leave it all there. Fucking Mummies would hardly make a use of scotch.”

“How long will all this last?” Kame asked. Jin had noticed already before that Kame either kept mostly quiet, or his voice came out a little raspy, due to lack of use—from all Jin knew, it might have been months, maybe _years_ since Kame had had a chance to talk to someone. Suddenly, Jin was incredibly grateful for having Ryo by his side all along. Things would have been so much different if Ryo hadn’t left the Zone with him.

“A week if we economize.” Jin overlooked the piles assorted in front of them. “It’s three of us now, but we should be fine for a few days.”

Kame opened his mouth, then closed it without saying a word.

Jin understood though. “It’s a tough world out there.”

“But you prefer it to the life you had in the Zone anyway.”

“No kidding!” Jin started stuffing their precious supplies back into bags, dividing everything more or less equally. In case one bag got lost for some reason, they wouldn’t lose everything.

When Kame didn’t say anything, this time it was because he waited for Jin to elaborate.

So Jin did.

“You know how your… family told you to stay away from the Zone?” Kame nodded, then Jin nodded too. “Let’s say they might have had a good reason for it. I can’t say what it was like in the beginning—though I can imagine that people were confused and scared shitless, and having a place with walls for protection and maybe also someone to tell them what to do in the world that didn’t make sense anymore must have been relief.”

“I suppose.”

“By the time I was a kid though, things had changed. I don’t know, it’s probably bound to happen every time you put a bunch of people together. Someone will take charge and eventually abuse their power somehow.”

Kame frowned. “And that happened in the Zone?”

“Pretty much. I mean, I get that rules are important and can hold things together when everything is falling apart, but there _should_ be a line. It’s not right when a few completely control the rest, not even if it’s supposedly in the name of a greater good.” A shudder ran through Jin as he remembered his childhood, his life controlled in even the tiniest aspect. He sighed. “In the end, before Ryo and I left, there were rules for everything. They even picked a girl I was meant to have kids with.”

“They picked you a girl?”

“One of the things they do. Preservation of human kind, and all that stuff. Kids are raised in the community, not in families. I don’t even know who my parents were. I grew up with Ryo and a bunch of other kids. We were no one’s and everyone’s. We had nannies, women who took care of us, and then members of the community taught us things they knew.”

“Hitomi taught me cooking,” Kame said.

“No one taught me that.” Jin finished with the bags. Only three empty glasses smelling of whisky were left on the counter. “Good thing one doesn’t need to be a master chef to pour hot water on a portion of dried food.”

“When we lived here, we used to grow basic vegetables on the roof. Hitomi was a great cook.”

“So you do remember stuff. From back then.”

“I remember things. I never said I didn’t.” Kame tugged on the long sleeves of his sweater, turned around and pushed himself up to sit on the counter. When on the ground, he was slightly smaller than Jin, and now he towered over him by some. “Memories are important. We don’t have much of anything else left.”

The seemingly simple statement carried a heavy truth. In only a few words Kame contained a lot of what some in the Zone had tried to teach the kids. The survival of humankind didn’t depend only on a safe place to sleep and enough food to eat, but also on remembering their roots, their history, not forgetting values that had once helped build civilization. Sentiment that had cost most of those people their lives. The self-proclaimed leaders of Central Tokyo Zone didn’t need any of that.

What mattered, according to them, was blind following of the set rules, working hard for a common cause, not asking needless questions, which over years had morphed into not asking _any_ questions. In the Zone, the past had been buried. There was nothing to learn from the past because there had been no Mummies, while life now revolved around them, even behind the Zone walls.

Jin was glad he could be where he was right now. Despite the dangers they had faced today, just sitting there in this old kitchen in this old house with Kame meant everything.

Jin and Kame sat there in silence, and in near darkness. Flickering flames of two candles bathed the kitchen in faint light, casting melancholic shadows on their faces. The light from the small fireplace they had used for cooking food didn’t reach them.

That was how Ryo found them when he burst back into the room, water still dripping off his wet hair. He was freshly shaved and also his hair was shorter. He had used his time in the bathroom to the best.

“Oh boy, this was _great_. You should try it, too.” He plopped down on an upturned part of a cupboard that he used as a seat before during dinner. His eyes gleamed in the candle light.

“I take it it’s working?” Jin chuckled.

It didn’t take much to switch on Ryo’s inner, usually subdued hedonist.

“Working? Man, I _could_ get used to this. I know we can’t stay for long, but what about a few days? This place is amazing!”

Jin glanced at Kame, unaware of doing so.

Kame’s reaction to Ryo’s excitement and the unexpected wish was important for Jin’s own attitude towards the matter. Staying somewhere nice for a change would be a luxury they didn’t dare hoping for. And Ryo, damn, Ryo deserved a calm moment at a place where he didn’t need to always look over his shoulder at every step and sleep with an eye open. But Jin wouldn’t want it if the price were Kame’s discomfort.

If Kame felt any, though, he didn’t show it.

“We can talk about it later,” Jin said in the end, leaving the topic open. For now. “I’m going to check the shower. You had better have left me some water there.”

“I’m not an asshole, you know? It still worked when I left.”

“Good. There are still two people looking forward to a moment in heaven.” Jin rubbed Kame’s shoulder.

“Go, damn, I left the candles burning.”

Wasting batteries and candles was a big no, so Jin pulled his hand away from Kame and hurried to the bathroom through the door Ryo had come back earlier. He didn’t hear any voices behind his back as he moved away from the kitchen.

However, after a moment the idea of a shower won over worries about Ryo and Kame not getting along while he would be away.

 

**

 

“Where’s Kame?” Jin returned to the kitchen only to find Ryo sitting there alone in near darkness.

Some time while Jin was enjoying the coldest shower of his life—expecting warm water would have been too much anyway, so when the freezing spray had hit him, he had yelped just a little—Ryo must have stifled one of the candles. Now he was hunched over an old, battered book he had been reading over and over again for as long as Jin could remember, squinting his eyes to be able to see the lines at all. Not that he needed it, at this point. He must have known it word by word.

Ryo took a moment to finish reading a paragraph, then glanced up with a shrug. “No idea. He wandered off a while ago.”

“Ryo!” Jin gasped, terrified by the mere thought of Kame roaming around the dark, empty, kind of scary building. Anything could happen.

“What. He will be fine. He has been on his own for like ten years, maybe more. He wasn’t particularly specific when I asked.” Ryo rolled his eyes. “Do you really think he would be still alive if he couldn’t take care of himself?”

“I don’t know,” Jin said, irritated by his own irritation, because of course Ryo was right. Kame wasn’t a helpless porcelain doll. If he had been, he wouldn’t have made it this far. He would have died one way or another after the last members of his family had passed away. The thing was, Jin felt responsible now. Just like he felt responsible for Ryo. With Ryo, the feeling was mutual, so much Jin knew. Now Ryo just needed to accept there was one more person to feel responsible about.

Jin lifted his hands in a rather theatrical gesture that he didn’t finish, changing his mind halfway. Something else about Ryo’s words clicked in. “Ten years? He told you he had been alone so long?”

“Not outright, but yeah. We had a little chat.”

“Fuck.”

Ryo grinned. “I’m glad to have you, too, Akanishi.”

Jin didn’t grin back, but the softness in his eyes spoke volumes.

“Didn’t Kame say where he was going? I should probably find him,” Jin said.

With a shrug, Ryo waved a hand in a vague direction of the main hall and the stairs leading to the upper floor.

That was enough for Jin. With a sudden, terrifying certainty he knew where to find Kame. He turned to Ryo to tell him, but Ryo’s nose was already buried in the book again, reading words and sentences that he could recite in his sleep. Jin couldn’t remember the title of the book, even though he used to know it. Back in a day, Ryo had sometimes read aloud from it to fill silence that usually stretched over the streets at night. Then he had stopped for some reason, and now Jin couldn’t remember what the reason had been.

In a way, the shabby book with pages turned yellow and all possible shades of brown and gray over time, was the last bit of normalcy in their lives. It was a thread connecting them to the past—not just their childhood in the Zone, but also the past from a long time before the Zone had been even built. Before there had been a reason for Zones to exist in the first place.

Everything else they carried along in their bags was out of necessity. Equipment and food, a small first aid kit somewhere at the very bottom of Ryo’s duffel—those things were helping them survive. Ryo’s book, Jin suspected, was helping him not to lose his mind,

That, and the story about the Moles.

Jin carefully walked up the stairs, avoiding piles of rubbish and mold, and the places he remembered to be extremely tricky to step on. The flashlight was helping just enough, but they might need to look for something with a stronger beam eventually.

Kame was exactly where Jin expected him to be. A weak light led Jin right into the room with a broken bed frame and kid drawings on the peeling wallpaper.

Like Ryo and his book, Kame was holding tight on to a past long gone.

Jin quietly knocked on the doorframe to tell Kame he was no longer alone. “Hey. The shower is cold as fuck, but you should try it.”

“Maybe later,” Kame mumbled; the only sign he acknowledged Jin’s presence.

“Okay. No rush. I was,” Jin stepped inside the room, feeling a bit like infringing on Kame’s personal space, even though there was still enough distance between them. Now empty, dust covered space where once a kid used to play, perhaps. What the place might have looked like ten, fifteen years ago? Was it already a ruin when a four year old Kame had lived there? Had he had toys, and what about the bicycle outside? Jin didn’t allow his brain to go down that road. “I was thinking we could stay here for a few days. Maybe. Ryo _really_ loves the shower.”

A shrug. “I don’t mind. If that’s what you worry about.”

“I—” Well, it was a part of Jin’s concerns. Yes.

“The place belongs to no one. Just like the other places around the city.”

“But it was your home.” Making sure not to point the flashlight directly at Kame, Jin stepped closer and swatted down next to the other man. “If it troubles you, we will leave in the morning.”

But Kame was biting his lip and shaking his head rather violently. “Don’t be ridiculous. This building has a door and running water. Maybe other things, too. We should stay.” He looked up to meet Jin’s concerned stare.

“Alright. Ryo will love to hear that.”

It was ridiculous how Jin couldn’t stop putting everything down on Ryo, as if he himself wasn’t excited about staying. First thing in the morning, they would check the place and gather everything remotely useful. It might have been a long shot, but maybe some of the things that had made Kame’s folks stay there all those years ago was still there somewhere. Little things to make life just a bit more bearable.

Jin wasn’t asking for much, was he?

A beam of Kame’s flashlight flickered over the wall and stabilized on far left, near the corner, where the wallpaper was partially peeled off and was hanging down off the wall. The loose end was covering most of the drawing in the lower part of the wall, low enough for a child’s eye level.

Kame moved and smoothed a hand over the damp paper, revealing the faded lines made in green and red crayon.

“I think we drew this to remind me I used to have parents. Real parents.” Kame’s voice cracked.

“You had Hitomi, and Daniel—was it?—and the others, though. You said it yourself, _they_ were your family.”

“You know what I mean.”

Jin shrugged. “I guess.” But he didn’t. Not really. In the Zone, the concept of family had stopped to matter because it posed limitations to preservation of humankind.

“I had parents. And brothers.” Kame turned his head to the fading drawing of a group of figures standing by the small hill Jin had noticed the first time he had entered the room earlier.

Jin shuffled closer and touched Kame’s back, gently soothing him.

He knew how to handle Ryo—with Kame, it was a big unknown territory.

Jin was learning as they went.

“Kame? Your family… the… I mean, your real family. What happened? Did they die, or—” Jin hated not knowing how to ask, and he hated even more that everything so far had been leading him to believe that Kame’s parents hadn’t just died. “Were they changed?”

 

“They were killed.”

Jin gasped. He had almost prepared himself for the worst, for Kame’s parents to have been infected and turned into Mummies. It would have made sense. Kame never said the words, always avoided saying ‘Mummies’ when he could, or changed the flow of sentences to leave those words out completely. In the Zone, some of the older folks hadn’t picked up on using the term either, because they remembered members of their families and closest friends get sick and turn into Mummies. The word was a permanent, painful reminder of their loss.

Slowly, Jin breathed out.

The relief didn’t last longer than that though.

In his worry about the worst possible scenario of Kame’s past, the scenario Jin had been taught to consider the worst and now the belief was engraved in his system of values; Jin completely forgot there was also another way to see it. Kame’s way—Kame’s childhood, his upbringing was different from the one kids in the Zone had.

Everything pointed at Kame’s values being more traditional. This Hitomi and Daniel, and all those other people that had been once Kame’s adopted family, had given Kame the background of the old world. Of the world that used to make sense. The world where becoming a zombie was a thing from horror stories, and where the worst that could happen to people was be killed.

“I’m sorry,” Jin muttered.

“Is it alright if we don’t talk about it?”

That was fine with Jin, too. For now. He needed time to figure out how to understand Kame first, and starting with the heavy stuff was never the best way.

“Should I leave you alone? I’m sorry for charging in here like this. You weren’t in the kitchen and Ryo wasn’t much help with where you went. I just… I don’t know, I wanted to make sure you were fine.”

Kame brushed a finger over the drawings one more time, then pushed himself up on his feet. Jin’s hand slipped off Kame’s back. And suddenly, Jin wasn’t sure what to do with that hand, where to move it; he pushed it down his front pocket, then changed his mind and chose the back one, but after another moment just left the hand hang freely along his hip. He was being stupid. Kame probably hadn’t even noticed there had been a hand on his back to begin with.

“Thanks,” Kame said simply. “For looking after me.”

“Yeah, that… well.”

Jin ran a hand through his still damp hair. He should have grabbed a hat downstairs. The night air outside was getting cold with the shortening late summer days. A few weeks later they would be spending evenings and nights close to fire instead of wandering through empty buildings.

“Hey, would you like to do something?” Jin asked to lighten the atmosphere, shake off the heavy tension that had settled between them.

The day had been rough enough; it was time to make things better.

“Do what?”

Jin’s question stirred Kame’s curiosity. Something Jin kind of counted on, and the next moment he had Kame’s hand in his and was pulling Kame along out of the room and across the hall.

“Come with me.”

“Jin, wait!”

“Trust me, okay?”

The place gave an eerie feeling all drowned in darkness, their flashlights dancing over cracks in the walls, peeled off wallpapers, pieces of what used to be furniture and also of other things that had been probably brought in here later. Maybe Kame’s family had brought them, taken them from other houses in the neighborhood because there had been no one else to make use of them. Jin almost expected to run into more drawings and more toys, or other reminders of the past life of the place, but if there had been any, they must have been lost under layers of rubbish.

A rusty ladder leading to the roof was hidden in a dark corner a couple of steps past the main staircase. Jin had noticed it during the first check of the second floor, but never had a chance to see if it still worked. Now he really hoped it did.

“Are we going up there?” Kame asked. He remembered more about this place than he let out.

Jin grinned. “When was the last time you watched stars?”

“I don’t know. The roof of the factory wasn’t the best for going up there.”

“Wanna see if the roof here is alright?” Jin pulled at a few rungs, rubbing corrosion dust into his palm, to test the ladder’s safety and stability. The trap door at the top was closed, but the wet maps covering the walls around were a clear signal rain water found its way inside quite easily. It couldn’t be too hard to find a way in the other direction as well.

Kame watched Jin’s every move expectantly. He wanted to go up.

“It was the last time I was there,” Kame mumbled.

“Great. Maybe you should be the one giving me a tour.”

Jin crawled up the ladder first, in case there would have been a problem with the trap door. When he pushed at it, though, it yielded easily without too much strength necessary. It opened, the hinges creaking after years of no use and weather impact. Had it been left open at some point in the past, the whole second floor would have suffered much more serious damage. Jin had seen enough buildings that had ceilings collapsed after storms had soaked and rotted the beams. Without a roof, any building was doomed to a quick end.

Outside the air was chilly and Jin shivered as it gnawed at his damp hair and head. He really should have taken the hat. For now, he at least pulled up his hood.

Kame joined him a moment later, looking wide-eyed around, not just at the cleared, dark inky sky peppered with stars and the bright crescent of the Moon shining almost directly above them, but also the rest of the city around them—drowned in pitch-black darkness, safe for lines of faint flare far on the horizon.

“That’s the Zone,” Jin pointed out. “That, over there. The lights.”

Kame stepped forward and squinted his eyes to see better. The lights of the Zone were standing out in the night, a bright signal of the Tokyo human sanctuary surrounded by vacant wilderness where Mummies were freely wandering through streets.

“I’ve never been anywhere close to that part of the city.”

“Makes sense, if your folks considered it dangerous.”

Kame walked closer to the edge of the roof, taking careful steps. The building looked pretty steady so far, but it was always better to be cautious anyway.

“Why are the lights on? Wouldn’t it be better to turn them off and hide?”

“The outer wall has big headlights on the top. Like ten, or maybe there’s more now, I’m not sure,” Jin explained. “The thing is, the Zone is not trying to hide, right the opposite. The lights are like a huge shiny ‘don’t fuck with us’ sign. When Mummies get closer, it’s easy to see them and guards can take precautions.”

Kame straightened up, his shoulders rolling back with tension. “They kill them?”

“Flamethrowers. I saw it just once, but it was… impressive. And terrifying,” Jin admitted, staring into the distance at the illuminated horizon. The Zone was only a day or two of walking away, but it could have been as well on a different planet. He wasn’t going back. “I was maybe six or seven, and it was the first time I got to see Mummies with my own eyes. Me, Ryo, and a few other kids sneaked up on the wall, because we were curious.”

Kame listened without interrupting.

“The guards burnt them all down to ashes the moment they got close enough. There was nothing much left. A pair of scorched, black bodies.” Jin frowned. “I still remember the stench, it lingered in the air for days afterwards.”

With a sigh, Jin sat down on the edge, dangling his legs off the roof. He placed the flashlight by his side, the beam shining into the dark, and pushed his hands deep into pockets of his old, warm hoodie. After a moment, he more heard than saw Kame lower himself to the spot next to him. Kame bent his legs and wrapped arms around his knees. Like that, he looked much smaller.

“Flamethrowers,” Kame whispered, “They burnt them alive. Just like Ryo did today.”

“That’s the only way. You know, because of the infection. It’s in their blood. If they get shot, it spreads through the air and most likely either kills the attackers or turns them into Mummies. Fire is the only known way to fight them.”

If it were possible, Kame curled up into himself even more, resting chin on the bent knees. He was thinking, Jin could already tell, but so far Kame’s thoughts had been an enigma.

“You don’t like it,” Jin said, sure his guess was right.

A shrug shook Kame’s shoulders.

“You saw what happened today,” Jin started carefully. He was glad the night dark hid his face. “They went after you—more Mummies than I’ve seen together at once. Ever. It’s not normal, Kame. Not that any of this _should be_ normal, but since Mummies in the streets is everyday life, we have to differ anomalies.—I don’t like it either. I can still smell the fucking burning flesh. No shower can help me with that.” Jin closed his eyes, inhaled, and the next thing he felt was a shy touch on his thigh. “If it’s either us or them, though, I will always choose us, Kame.”

Snapping his eyes open, Jin found himself staring into Kame’s, Kame’s face too close, right in his personal space. If Jin held his breath, he could feel Kame’s slow exhales.

“What if it’s not that easy?” Kame’s words tickled against Jin’s shaved skin.

“What do you mean?”

But Kame pulled away, then also his hand disappeared from Jin’s leg, and Jin wondered if it hadn’t all been only in his head.

“Can you see stars from the Zone?”

Not really the smoothest way to change the topic, but Kame wasn’t the type to play games. If Kame wanted to rather talk about stars and not about ways to kill Mummies, Jin got it and could play along.

“Not a chance.” He leaned back, propped himself on elbows, and tipped head backwards. The starry sky above him was an incredible sight to see. Something to be grateful for every single day. “The headlights are too bright. Thanks to them the Zone sees everything—and nothing.”

“They are missing a lot.”

“Don’t tell them,” Jin chuckled.

Once again following Jin’s example with a little delay, Kame lied down and stared at the sky. The flashlights were left pointed in a different directions, momentarily forgotten despite how injudicious it was to waste batteries like that.

“What about you? Do you miss something from there? From the Zone?”

“Not really. I never had anything when I lived there. Personal possessions are unfavorable. Things belong to everyone.”

Kame nodded, turned his head to the side to look at Jin. “And people too.”

“People too. Ryo and I left with nothing but the clothes we wore. And he had that damn book in a pocket somewhere. No surprise there, though, since he never let it out of his hand. Would you believe I don’t remember times when Ryo didn’t have it? Anyway, everything we have now, we have gathered over the years. The first week out here in the streets taught us a lesson.” Jin felt Kame’s eyes on him, and met the look.

“It must have been tough. No one prepared you for what was out there, right?”

“People don’t leave the Zone,” Jin agreed. “We were lost at first. Two kids frightened by their own shadows. I don’t really know how we made it. Probably because we didn’t have other choice.”

“I’m a little lost now, too, I suppose.” It was barely a whisper into the dark.

The shy confession cut right through Jin. Just today, he had seen Kame and his fears, had seen Kame face them, had seen Kame fight with himself or retreat into the darkest, deepest corner of his head—only to come out open with a few, simple words.

Jin shifted, rolled on his side and hovered slightly over Kame. “You are not.”

Kame blinked. “But—”

“You have me now. And Ryo, too. You can stay with us. I mean it.”

“If I do, can we stay here? Just for a while?” Kame asked softly, the look in his eyes telling Jin the closeness surprised him, just like a moment ago Jin had been taken unawares when Kame had leaned close.

“For a while, yes.”

Kame smiled, and the little glint of gratitude and relief was worth the worries Jin knew would soon start gnawing on his mind. Staying at one place was potentially dangerous—however, if the place was this one, they just might take a risk. For once.

 

**

 

The next morning Ryo took another shower just because he could. It was one of the small things, tiny pleasures, that made life a bit better, and even though normally they had to economize nearly everything and be careful with resources, seeing Ryo emerge into the kitchen with a hood pulled up over his damp hair, with chattering teeth but otherwise blissed grin all over his face, Jin didn’t say a word, and handed his friend a chopped cup filled with steaming tea.

“So I take it we are staying here,” Ryo said around a mouthful of crackers and tea, the hot drink warming up his body that had gone through a freezing process under the shower spray. He was not going to complain though. Not at all.

Jin glanced at Kame who was chewing on his breakfast at the other end of the counter, and when Kame didn’t protest, Jin nodded. “Temporary shelter.”

“Temporary shelter,” Ryo repeated dreamily, his head already working on some math as to how many times could he use the shower and wash used dishes in the sink. “I like the sound of it.”

Jin leaned back against a counter running along the wall on the right. A few feet further in Kame’s direction there was a built in dishwasher, the hinges had been eaten off by corrosion and the front door had fallen off, becoming a part of the rotting clutter all over the floor.

“We need to stay alert though. We haven’t had a chance to check the closest neighborhood last night and we don’t know the situation.” Jin hated how his brain couldn’t shut up, ever. While Ryo was ready to make the best of the local water situation and Kame had years of memories to think of, Jin’s mind was working on overload—first of all, they needed to stay alive. “Whenever you can, keep an eye on the outside. If you see something moving there, be careful. It could be anything.”

“Roger!” Ryo saluted and took a big bite of the cracker.

Kame glanced over, a smile tugged at the corner of his lips, but it was gone as quick as it appeared, and he hid himself behind the edge of his cup of tea.

“The first thing we do today is search this place,” Jin went on.

“It’s a ruin, Jin—no offence, Kame—and I’ve already checked the kitchen, as well as the pantry in the back. Besides being gross, it’s also empty. Not even one bottled water or anything left. Someone must have looted this place pretty bad.”

“I know, I checked the kitchen this morning, too. The thing is, the place doesn’t look _looted_. It looks just abandoned.” Jin looked at Kame, waiting for the other to add something, even though it’s been years since his family had lived there. Not many people in the streets, though. Chances were they had found the house in a very similar shape Kame’s folks had left it over a decade ago.

Ryo didn’t argue.

The two of them rarely argued in general.

“Fine,” Ryo said finally. “We rummage through this place and bring anything remotely useful back here.”

“Right. I did a quick check of exits and windows earlier, but it might be worth taking a closer look at the windows. If we are staying here—”

“And that we are,” Ryo cut in with a grin.

Jin grinned back. “—If we are staying here, we shouldn’t tempt our luck. Kame? You think you’re up to looking around?”

“I can do that.”

“Good.” Jin and Ryo were used to working in two people, they had something close to a system even, but pulling Kame into the necessary tasks seemed like a good idea. Searching places with more people would save time, and the faster Kame learnt what to do, the better for everyone. And if he could take the first lesson at a place he actually knew, it was only a plus. Maybe he would remember a secret hiding place or a forgotten stash of something useful. One could never know.

In the early days after the breakout, people had tended to hide whatever valuables they owned, because they had believed the infection would have washed over and they would have been able to come back and go on with their lives. Soon, as the pandemic had spread without a single sign of toning down, gold and money had lost their value and people had switched to saving food and water. In the end, most of them hadn’t needed those either.

After finishing breakfast and once again making sure the fire they used for cooking wouldn’t spread and burn down the place with them still inside, they split to search through the building. Ryo offered to once again go through the ground floor. With the kitchen, pantry, and bathroom mostly checked, there was only a few other rooms left, while the second floor was still an unknown territory. Judging by what Jin remembered about the shape of the house from the outside, they had quite a busy morning, maybe even a whole day, ahead.

In what was quickly becoming a pattern, Kame followed Jin and they worked together, searching through the rooms upstairs, with Kame’s room, how Jin started calling the one with drawings in his head, being left out of the search this time. Jin had a feeling that if they entered that one, they wouldn’t leave any time soon.

It was strange to think that someone could have nice memories of their childhood and wanted to remember. Jin’s childhood was nothing to reminiscence about, and already the little he had shared with Kame last night had given him bad dreams. Luckily he didn’t remember anything particular after waking up into what might be one of the last really bright days with surprisingly cloudless sky spreading above the city. Maybe they could watch stars again tonight.

Most of the rooms were similar to the one with the drawings. Empty, shabby, with broken furniture, and piles of peeled off wallpapers and plaster on the ground. One room had a broken window and a big part of the front wall was black and green and sickly gray with mold growing there for years. Despite the fresh air coming in through the hole that used to be a window, the inside was stale and stunk.

Kame choked on a breath, and backed out of the door the moment he entered, and Jin didn’t stay much longer.

They shut the door and in joint efforts pulled what was left of a shattered cabinet standing nearby to block the way inside. Anything with broken windows or other means of access inside the house needed to be blocked.

“This should be enough.” Jin dusted his hands against the front of his pants, leaving dirty smears all over.

“I’m surprised we found only one bad window so far, to be honest,” Kame mused.

They stood there in front of the cabinet, a simple one with top light blue paint flaking off and revealing a previous layer of bright red. Jin picked on one of the cracks and started scraping the blue away with his nail.

“Ryo probably got it worse. What do you think this place used to be originally?”

“A hotel? One of those small, family run places.”

Jin nodded, even though he had little to no idea what family run hotels might have looked like before the infection had spread. Probably like this, he concluded. A small place with a few rooms for guests, a kitchen that would manage to serve a small restaurant, maybe a backyard or a garden outside.

“We should order breakfast in bed tomorrow.” Jin grinned at Kame. “That’s what you do when you are in a hotel, isn’t it?”

“No idea.”

“It would be great though, right?”

“I want pancakes.” Kame was surprisingly quick to jump in on Jin’s game. “And a salad. Are there chickens in the Zone? Have you ever had an egg?”

“Once in a while. They keep some animals in the Zone, and later when we ran into wild chickens, we managed to shoot some.”

“Asako used to keep chicks in a small hen house on the roof.” Kame added another name and another piece of his past to the big, jagged puzzle of his life that Jin was trying to form in his head.

Jin noticed the spark of expectation and hope in Kame’s eyes.

“It’s been years. The chicks must be gone for a long time now.” Jin didn’t like being the one seeing things realistically. He didn’t like tempering Ryo whenever he started about finding the Moles and finally having a life worth of living, and now Jin was also spoiling the rare moment of Kame’s happiness.

“Please.”

“Fine. We could use a little break anyway,” Jin agreed.

Kame grabbed Jin’s hand and then they were once again crawling up the ladder and through the trap door on the roof.

The view of the city was breathtaking in daylight. On a bright, clear day like this one, one could see as far as the skyscrapers towering above the neighborhoods around. In a rift between higher buildings, Jin showed Kame where the sea was. He and Ryo had been to the seaside a couple years ago during one extremely hot summer. The memory made Jin wonder if they could, maybe, go there next year as well.

“We could check on the amusement park there, too. It’s just by the water. It’s pretty cool. Disney World.”

Kame furrowed his brows, tilted his head, but they were too far to actually see anything.

“An amusement park?”

Jin nodded. “It’s probably completely swallowed by vegetation by now, but it’s huge. With roller coaster rails higher than we are now. It must have been fucking impressive when it was open. Carousels and all sorts of swings. The shops were either looted or useless, but we didn’t expect to find much.”

“I lived in a library once,” Kame said.

“You should tell Ryo about it.”

“It was only a small one, I think. Hitomi told me about huge buildings full of books. Can you imagine it? Floor after floor with nothing but books. Most of them are gone now, though. After electricity went off, people used books for kindling.”

“The book Ryo has, he stole it somewhere, so I’m thinking there had to be a library inside the Zone, too. Before they burnt everything in the first years.”

“What direction is the Zone now?” Kame asked, once again changing the topic, even though not much.

They were standing facing different side than last night, so Jin needed a second to find the right spot on the horizon. Without the misty glow in night darkness, finding the Zone wasn’t easy. Even less so since now it was all hidden behind a forest of tall buildings. The high structures were covered in green, sprouts crawling up the metal skeletons once filled in with glass, now bare and providing shelters to birds. Some buildings had trees growing out from also the higher floors.

There was a tree also in the corner of the roof of their house, but the maple there was nothing compared to the robust, decades old trees they saw elsewhere.

Jin finally found the right side, and holding Kame’s shoulders, shifted the other man a little to the right. Between them and the horizon stood a skyscraper with a sinking plate once carrying a logo of a company Jin never heard of.

“There. Behind that building.”

Kame nodded, but lacking anything particular to see there, he soon slipped out of Jin’s reach and started walking across the roof.

Jin let his hands fall down. It was becoming a habit of sort, Kame being close at one moment and sidling away the next one.

Grass and low shrubs grew out of the roof everywhere. Some of the greenery was in late bloom, others were slowly dying with the end of summer. Among random weed seeded by wind, Jin spotted a few spots with plants with familiar shapes of leaves—herbs and vegetables he had seen cultivated in the Zone. It must have been the garden Kame had mentioned before. Jin ran a hand through the top sprouts of the plants, feeling the tickle against his palm. Maybe they could attempt to harvest some of it and enrich their lunch today.

As expected, there wasn’t much left of the henhouse, just a few wooden boxes with ripped out netting at the front. Some of the boxes had fallen apart, like so many other things made of wood and abandoned at places where constant weather changes ruled over everything.

Kame chattered a bit more about Asako and Hitomi, about chickens, then randomly returned back to their previous conversation and asked about the amusement park Jin had mentioned. They walked around the roof before eventually pulling some small carrots out of the ground, and finally crawled down the ladder back inside the house.

The rest of the morning went by fast.

Jin discovered a small metal box containing candles and matches, miraculously kept dry and thus still working. A moment later Kame called him over to the next room where various garments were hanging down plastic racks. Coats and dresses, shirts with sleeves nibbled apart by moths and rats, some folded colorful quilts stored on a deep shelf above. Kame pulled himself on the tips of his toes and grabbed one, spreading it by shaking it, and then wrapped the black and blue and fuchsia colored quilt around his shoulders.

“It’s warm,” he sighed with content, pulling the cloth closer around himself.

Jin drew down the rest and held it, slightly bending backwards for balance. “Got it.”

“Are we heading back?” Kame helped Jin carry some of the load.

They had left other things, including the vegetables from the roof garden, on a neat pile in the main hall just by the staircase.

“I think so. Time to check on Ryo, anyway.”

Carefully balancing everything they had found around the upper floor, the clothes, quilts, vegetables, the box with matches and candles, Jin and Kame descended back to the ground floor and made their way into the kitchen where they expected to find Ryo.

“Hey Ryo, guess what?” Jin shouted. “We’re bringing you some salad for lunch!”

Kame held tight on his load and peeked around it to get a better view of what was in front of him. He didn’t want to walk into something and drop stuff on the floor.

“RYO!” Jin cried out louder. Blindly, he reached the counter and placed everything he had carried on the top of it. “What the hell?”

The kitchen was empty, with no Ryo in sight.

The counter was cleaned up, as well as the dishes they used to serve breakfast. Glasses and plates were lined up nicely, just ready for another meal. Fire was safely cracking in a makeshift fireplace on the ground—they had agreed before that in spite of possibly not being the smartest thing to leave it burn, stifling it and kindling it again later wouldn’t be practical. They were lucky this time, wind from outside didn’t find its way in to put the kitchen in danger.

Kame’s heap of haul landed right next to Jin’s.

“Where _is_ he?” Jin ruffled his hair, looking around. “I swear, if he’s freezing his ass off in another round of shower—”

Kame would have laughed if he hadn’t been actually worried.

Then a door banged somewhere in the back. Their heads snapped after the sound; Jin instinctively moved forward, positioning himself between the door and Kame. When he realized his reaction a moment later, he told himself he would have done the same for anyone, too.—Maybe not anyone, but for Ryo for sure.

“I’M THE FUCKING BEST!” Ryo roared from behind the door, then the board flew open, hit some rubbish on the floor; and Ryo was walking in like a boss, flushed face with a wide satisfied smug plastered all over it. “Hey kiddos, we are going to eat like fucking kings today. You better think of a way to thank uncle Ryo.”

In Ryo’s hand, a chicken was wriggling wildly in vain attempts to get free.

“Anyone interested in some meat along with your salad?” Ryo grinned.

“You got to be kidding me.”

The chicken clucked angrily, Ryo held it tight, hand stretched forward so the poor bird was only tossing about in the air.

Jin shot Kame a look. They had been looking for chicks upstairs while Ryo had apparently chased one downstairs.

“Do I even want to know?” Jin laughed.

“Probably not, but I will tell you anyway. I was checking the windows at the back when I saw a small flock scraping dirt and eating out in the yard. I jumped out and pounced, chased this little shit around for a while, but whatever, here we are. Ta-da!”

“You went _outside_? Ryo!”

But Ryo just rolled his eyes. “I know, okay. I was careful.”

“You were chasing a damn chicken,” Jin groaned.

“I would have stopped if a Mummy had suddenly walked out on me. I’m not an idiot.” Ryo was always careful, that was true. Ryo also rarely put himself into situations that might have become dangerous in any way. He hated being outside—and yet here he was, holding a chicken he had caught himself after what somehow sounded like a big adventure. And an incredibly rash, hotheaded thing to do.

A sharp pang of anger hit Jin, when he realized how badly this all could have gone. “You sure acted like one!” This time he raised his voice with frustration. “Fuck!”

Ryo frowned. “So what now? You want me to let the chick go?”

The fowl clucked again, not liking a bit how it had been tossed around.

Jin froze. “Don’t you fucking dare!” He breathed hard, fighting to calm down. He got angry out of fear, not because he was mad. God, Ryo had brought a chicken, they could broil it, have it with a salad—the last time they had eaten freshy roasted meat had been before they had run out of ammo. Jin had shot a rabbit back then. Months ago.

Watching the exasperation fade out of Jin, Ryo relaxed, too.

“Are we done with this?”

Jin still didn’t like to think that while he and Kame had been on the roof, enjoying the view, or almost having fun while searching the rooms upstairs, Ryo had been _outside_ all alone, with no one to watch his back, to provide a second pair of eyes to scan the surroundings. Anything could have happened, and Jin would have found out only later. Much later.

He shuddered, and quickly pushed the thought away.

Ryo was alright—with a very alive chicken.

“Just don’t do it next time,” Jin mumbled. Only then he realized something warm was pressed firmly against the small of his back. Kame was touching him, offering help without saying a word. For the briefest of moments, Jin allowed himself to melt into the touch.

Ryo gave a hardly perceptible nod.

With the tension gone, all three of them relaxed. The atmosphere in the kitchen cleared up, the chicken’s sounds drawing all attention to an actual task to handle.

“So,” Ryo mused, “Who is gonna kill the thing?”

Jin stepped back, colliding with Kame. “Don’t look at me.”

“I _am_ looking at you, though. I can’t kill it.”

“And you think I can?” Jin nearly choked.

“You two know how to make a Molotov cocktail and use it, but can’t cut a chicken head off?” Kame didn’t sound like he quite believed them. “How did you kill the other animals? Before.”

Jin shrugged, while Ryo was too busy holding the chick that was flapping its wings and put up another round of fight for its freedom.

“We shot them. I told you.”

Ryo nodded fiercely in an agreement. “That was easy.”

“Maybe not easy-easy, but my aim isn’t bad, so when we still had ammo, providing us with fresh meat was alright.”

“I will do it,” Kame said simply, surprising both Jin and Ryo. Even the chicken froze in Ryo’s hand for a second, as if it could have understood what was being said and that the decision about its life had been made. “Just give me a knife.”

Jin and Ryo exchanged a look. This was something neither of them would have guessed. They just stood there and stared while Kame took care of the chicken with such skills that Jin quietly whistled a few times, which gained him a nudge from Ryo. Once the bird was dead and had feathers pulled out, Kame finally asked for some help. The three of them worked together again, joking about hunting wildly living animals and Ryo reenacting the whole adventure of catching the chicken for them. Jin laughed so hard he almost choked.

With vegetables and herbs from the roof, the roasted chicken soon filled the kitchen with sweet, spicy aroma. Ryo refused to leave; he was sitting by the fireplace, flipping pages of his book, but mostly just staring at the chicken turning pink and then light brown.

Kame, wrapped in the quilt from before again, sat down close to the fire after some hesitation and worries his presence might disturb Ryo.

Silence hung around them at first; Ryo pretended to be reading, Kame pulled his knees up against his chest, rested his chin on top of them, and stared into the flames. His eyes flicked up and across the fireplace to Ryo every now and then, like he was trying to read the other’s mind.

Every now and then, Ryo returned the pensive look.

“Thanks,” Ryo cleared his throat, lowering the book and straightening up his back. “We would have been still arguing what to do with the fucking bird without you. Lame, isn’t it? Sometimes I wonder how we’ve managed to survive so far.” Ryo’s laugh was a bitter one.

“How about you take my little butcher skill as a contribution to this, whatever it is?” Kame smiled.

“That’s some neat skill you got there.”

“You didn’t do bad yourself yesterday. Thanks for saving my life.”

“Oh, that. _That_ was fucking scary. I had no idea what I was doing.”

Kame shrugged. “You knew how to make the weapon.”

“And he also knows how to throw shit,” Jin joined them with a raspy laughter, approaching them from the back of the kitchen and bringing a plate garnished with slices and pieces of vegetables. He placed it on the edge of the counter behind Kame’s back.

“Yeah, yeah, right. Can we not have a repeat any time soon?” Ryo groaned.

“The whisky from the factory is too quality to be wasted on killing Mummies anyway.” Jin grinned at Ryo, who was trying to hide himself behind the pages of his book once again. Not finding a response there, Jin turned to Kame. A grin almost mirroring Jin’s was playing with the corners of Kame’s lips.

They enjoyed the chicken, chatting easily between bites, and moaning at the delicious taste the rest of time. It had been a while since any of them had anything but dry and dehydrated food from packages older than them. Jin used to wonder what would happen when someday the world would run out of reserves of freeze-dried food. Then he had stopped thinking about it altogether because it had become too depressing. With no dry food left out there, the only hope for people would be behind the Zone walls. Which was, after all, something kids had been taught to believe ever since the walls had been erected.

Compliments about the chicken turned into Ryo having questions about the vegetable garden on the roof, then into Kame asking more about what life in the streets was like, then Kame mentioned living in a library in the past—and that was when Jin was gradually left out of the conversation because Ryo seemed to have a stock of book and library related questions saved for a situation exactly like this one.

Before the food was all gone, it felt like they had been together much longer than since the previous day. Like Kame had left the Zone with them all those years ago, had been wandering from one place to another by their side.

Kame laughed aloud and had a cute tendency to involve his whole body whenever he burst out in a fit of cackles. His hands would slap his knees repeatedly, sometimes the attack would be aimed at whoever was nearby—in this case, Jin’s shoulder.

By the end of lunchtime the three of them were wheezing, and the world outside didn’t matter at all.

When nothing but bones was left and Jin was chewing on the last remaining piece of carrot, Ryo shifted the topic of their conversation again, and Jin didn’t have another choice but to follow, spilling out a good number of childhood stories. He had shared bits of his and Ryo’s past with Kame already before, but this time things were different. For once, Ryo didn’t give him a chance to paint the past in anything but truthful colors, with all the stupid and embarrassing details. Jin didn’t mind only because he remembered a few things about Ryo that he could use as payback. And then there was also the fact that unlike before, when Kame had been curious about life in the Zone, Jin had told him about the grim side of it—simply because in his head, the mere word ‘Zone’ was connected to gloom and lack of freedom. Ryo felt it the same way, for the most part anyway. However, right now, talking about gangs of small kids sneaking around and causing innocent trouble, felt just as much a part of Jin’s early years as the thoughts of possible punishments that had waited for those who had been caught in the act.

The time passed in a seemingly never ending string of ‘Do you remember…?’s, ‘Would you believe we did…?’s and ‘Remember the time we…’s, with Jin and Ryo trying to top each other’s stories; and the three of them were laughing and snorting, drinking tea, and enjoying the heat radiating from the fire. Kame leaned closer to Jin at some point, rested his head on Jin’s shoulder, and pulled away only when Ryo got to the end of yet another story and the final point threw them all into laughter again.

Jin was beginning to understand the appeal of staying at one place. It was only a second day, but he knew that either Kame, or Ryo, would sooner or later bring up the idea of putting off the leave and moving on, and Jin couldn’t think of a single argument against staying where they were now.

They had proviant, water, a roof above their heads. They hadn’t seen any Mummies since yesterday, and that had been quite a few streets away, anyway.

Being constantly on the move was exhausting, sure, but had kept Ryo and himself alive so far. Kame, on the other hand, had moved minimally and only when he had run out of resources, and he was alive, too. It was a dilemma Jin needed to solve, rather sooner than later. They would need to talk about it; about what their options were now.

The longer they stayed at one place, the more in danger they could be—and the harder the eventual leave would be someday.

Even leaving the Zone had been a difficult choice; not because Jin hadn’t wanted to leave, but simply because the mere thought of walking outside into the territory ruled by Mummies used to scare the hell out of him, and staying at the place he knew and where it was easy to guess what to expect to happen next, was fairly comfortable. If one had closed their eyes at the terror in the name of a greater good practiced by the ruling structures.

Jin snapped back into present when Kame shifted against his shoulder, rubbing his face into Jin to muffle snorts and giggles. Jin blinked, looked at Ryo, and realized he must have spaced out at some point and Ryo had taken over, telling Kame yet another story.

“—so there Jin was, _making out_ with this boy that we didn’t even know went with us. I still think the poor thing joined us only because Jin talked him into it.” Ryo took a sip of tea, watching Kame and Jin with a hardly readable expression. Jin would have sworn Ryo smirked, but if he had, it had passed too fast.

“Nishikido! Stop telling him stuff like that,” Jin groaned.

“Should I rather tell him about Takako then?” Ryo’s eyelids fluttered. He was like a poster boy for innocence. “Oh, maybe I should. _That_ one is really fun—”

Jin pouted. “Hey!”

“Who is Takako?” Kame straightened up, suddenly curious.

“No one.”

Ryo stuck his tongue out, which was pretty much like flipping Jin off without having to move more than really necessary. “She was Jin’s first love. They were inseparable for a year or so. She was older than us, but always joined our little gang.” Under Kame’s weight snuggled up close against his side, Jin was gradually tensing. “They wanted to stay together, and maybe have a kid someday.”

“What happened?” Kame asked quietly, Jin’s palpable discomfort rubbing off on him, too.

“What do you think? They were deemed incompatible. Takako was paired up with another guy, an older one, someone closer to her age. We were hardly fourteen at that time and as sick as the newly formed society in the Zone is, they don’t want to see kids have sex and their own children. Plus relationships based on love are troublesome in general. The government in the Zone believes that family units would slow reproduction. People might also start caring more about their family unit than the common cause. It’s pretty sick.” Ryo became silent, then sighed. “Okay, bad example. This wasn’t a fun story at all.” He kept his eyes down, feeling guilty and not daring looking at Jin. He could imagine the sight more than well.

“We left the Zone not even a month after Takako was taken to the procreation sector to… you know.” Ryo shut up for good, stared into his almost empty cup, then splashed the rest of the cooled liquid into the fire.

Kame was frowning so hard it wrinkled his whole face.

His hand found Jin’s and squeezed, even though Jin didn’t put on any attempt to hold back or in any other way acknowledge the touch.

The things Ryo was talking about had happened years ago, and yet he had never gotten over it completely.

Violently taking away the future Jin had made up for himself had been the last straw. That was when he had known the Zone wasn’t a place for him. When they had come to him a few days after sending Takako away, to tell him he would be soon paired up with another, better suited girl, Jin had said _fuck it_. Three weeks later Ryo and himself had stood outside the wall, face to face with the first Mummy they had ever seen up close in their lives, but no matter how scared shitless they had been, they had also never before felt more alive and free.

If his choice had been to cost him his life, then so fucking be it.

At least he would know he would have no one but himself to blame, and that Jin could live with.

He had no desire to let anyone tie him on strings and play with him like he had been a fucking puppet.

Ignoring the warm hand holding his, Jin stood up, jerking his hand free, and walked away, trying to tell himself that Ryo didn’t mean any bad with having told Kame about Takako. It all had happened so long ago that it was now nothing but one of the stories to tell—and Ryo liked talking of any kind. With Kame here now, Ryo had been given a chance to talk and draw unexpected reactions. Something he couldn’t do with Jin, because the two of them had known each other’s stories by heart by now.

It was late afternoon, but the weather was still nice and the sky was bathing in blue, with only a few clouds splashed randomly around.

Jin crawled up on the roof, telling himself he just needed some air.

He couldn’t have been alone longer than a few minutes when he heard careful steps behind himself.

Kame stopped, giving Jin some space. “Ryo is sorry. He didn’t mean to—”

“I know he didn’t,” Jin sighed.

Kame shuffled his feet closer, standing just behind him as they stood and watched the neighborhood. Maybe someday they could walk up to the top of one of those really high skyscrapers and get a real view.

“She must have been special, the girl.”

Once upon a time, Jin would have said yes. “I was a teenager, she was older, pretty, and interested,” Jin said bluntly. Back in the time he had called Takako his first love, and Ryo stuck to it. “It all happened a long time ago.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I don’t think about her.” Jin let out a frustrated sigh, and turned to face Kame. “You asked me yesterday if I miss something from the Zone.” Kame nodded, cautiously waiting where this would lead to. “Then yes, there _are_ certain things I miss, but she is not one of them, neither is any other kid I used to mess around with when I was old enough to know about messing around with someone.”

Jin walked over to the overgrown vegetable garden and sat down on the curb. He stayed quiet until Kame followed him there and did the same.

“It’s going to sound strange, but sometimes I miss people. Not particular people, just people in general. The Zone was full of people, so I suppose it means I miss the Zone, too. Sort of. I don’t miss all the rules and the power structures that come in one package with living in the Zone, though. I have Ryo and that’s great, don’t take me wrong, but—as awful as this must sound—sometimes I wish I had also other options, you know?”

“I don’t know about that,” Kame admitted. “Remember? I’ve been on my own for a while.” More like a couple of years.

“How did you not go crazy?”

With a shrug, Kame chuckled dryly. “I was talking to myself a lot, so maybe I did.”

Jin studied Kame’s face with a half amused expression, then his eyebrow twitched. “You seem just fine to me.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“And now you have me and Ryo. If staying with us doesn’t drive you nuts, nothing will, I promise.” Jin swayed slightly to the left and gave Kame a little nudge.

“And you have me,” Kame blurted out. Then blushed. “You know, for options.”

“Looks like we both win here.”

Kame patted Jin’s knee.

“You know what else I kind of miss now?” Jin spoke again only after a pause. His mind was still reeling from the fact that Kame just made it pretty clear he would stay with them.

“What is it?”

“Music. The Zone has generators, so electric appliances work, with limitations, of course. I used to have an old iPod with a couple of hours worth of music, and a cord, so if I got lucky, I would find a way to charge it occasionally.”

“You left it back there, though,” Kame guessed.

Jin shrugged. “No point at taking it along. We knew we were heading into a no electricity land, so I gave it to one of the younger kids. He had been nagging me about it all the time. You should have seen his face when he realized I was being serious.”

“What kind of music?”

“What?”

Kame rolled his eyes. “What kind of music would you like to listen to.”

“Anything, actually. After all the time of silence, I’m not picky.” Jin let out a throaty chuckle. Not that he had been ever picky about music. He knew the songs he used to listen to, and what more of music once used to be out there, most of it was lost for good, anyway.

Kame tilted his head, a frown once again drawing his eyebrows closer together. As they sat almost side by side, Jin could see tiny freckles high on Kame’s cheeks, probably a souvenir from the sunny days of passing summer. A little darker dot graced the corner of Kame’s eye, to Jin’s momentary amusement it reminded him of the mole on his own face. Jin didn’t even realize he smiled at the thought, and his hand was already reaching up to touch Kame’s cheek when he came back to his senses and pushed the hand back down.

“So old classic would be fine?”

“What do you plan? Miraculously pull a working radio out of your pocket?” Jin doubted that.

But Kame was already standing up and offering Jin a hand to help him up on his feet as well. “Not really, but I’ve come across something close to a miracle earlier while we were searching the house.”

“Huh? You found something useful and didn’t tell me?”

“You told me to collect clothes, food, and essentials,” Kame said, completely unfazed by Jin’s accusation. “A collection of vinyls from the 50’s is hardly either of those.”

“Show me?”

Jin didn’t need to insist too much; Kame led him back inside, and after a little confusion about the right door, they found themselves crouching in front of a low cabinet. One half of its door was holding on just one rusty hinge, revealing a messy pile of dusty paper covers and black vinyl discs. They were scattered on two shelves, a few had fallen out on the floor where the ubiquitous rubbish and lines of tiny rat droppings had covered them.

Opening the other door wing revealed the real treasure Kame had found earlier, even though he hadn’t thought either Jin or Ryo might see it the same. An old gramophone was sitting there, its flaring horn dressed in corrosion and cobwebs.

Jin took it out, moving the box carefully on the top of the cabinet. It didn’t look like it might ever release a sound of any kind, but then Kame was standing by his side, a disc ready in one hand and a handle to operate the gramophone in the other.

“Is it going to work?” Jin wondered.

Pulling sleeves of his hoodie over his palms, Jin wiped the gramophone and the horn, frowning at all the dust. The horn opening was shaped like a small flower, with traces of colors, blue, purple and white against the golden background. The thing must have been impressive back in the day. A family might have kept it with them for as long as a century, enjoying its gritty sound on quiet evenings. It was like in old movies, or stories told by elders in the Zone.

“Only one way to find out, hm?”

Kame placed the disc where it belonged. It was chipped around the outer edge, but sat on the surface perfectly. The handle was a little tough to fit in place, the slot on the side was awry, but all it took was adding a bit more strength.

The first tones coughed out of the horn as the needle jumped over the rotating disc, drawing a shaky line in dust.

Jin’s head moved the moment the inarticulate sounds became smoother, squeaks and rasps morphed into a trumpet and piano, and then a soft female voice joined in.

Like magic, Jin’s anxious expression turned into a bright smile. “I can’t believe this.”

Music filled the room, bringing life into walls that hadn’t seen but death and emptiness for too long. Jin and Kame just stood there, eyes closed, and minds carried miles and years away, far from desolated streets of Tokyo. The singer’s voice sang in French and Japanese about everything being alright. Jin thought whether Kame had picked that one on purpose, or whether the choice of the album might have been accidental.

Just as he wanted to ask, he felt Kame’s hand touching him, fingers slipping between his, and Jin didn’t hesitate to close his fingers around Kame’s.

“Dance with me?” Kame didn’t dare looking up.

Jin blinked., the cracking mixed with music coming out of the horn suddenly a buzz in his head. “Dance?”

Kame was pulling him further into the space where the floor was empty. “Dance. Hitomi tried to teach me. So now I could—teach you?”

At this point, Jin was almost sure he would agree to anything Kame came up with. Dancing to actual music didn’t sound like a bad idea, anyway. Jin couldn’t believe that after all those years there was something else than just Ryo’s and his own voice in his head. The singer’s words were imprinting into his memory.—Sooner or later they would have to leave this place and the gramophone was too big, too heavy, and too fragile to take it with them, but the melody, that was something Jin could carry with him as far as life would take him.

Without words, they settled on Jin’s hands on Kame’s hips, and Kame’s hands holding Jin’s shoulders.

Jin was humming the melody.

Kame didn’t do much of the aforementioned teaching, but it wasn’t necessary. Their feet moved on their own, guided by the slow, gentle music. They were hardly moving, feet bumping against each other at first, but eventually they fell into a rhythm; Jin dared teasingly tug on Kame’s hips when he wanted the other to move in a particular way, but mostly they had just a little idea of what they were doing.

Before they knew it, the space between them disappeared and they were dancing pressed to each other. Kame could wrap his arms around Jin’s shoulders and neck now, while Jin’s palms were warm and heavy at the small of Kame’s back.

Jin’s breath tickled Kame’s ear. The quiet hums gradually became mumbled words, and Jin was singing along with the song, whispering to Kame that he was happy and that everything was great—and at the moment, they both were very close to believe it.

“I like to imagine people who lived here,” Kame said.

“What do you imagine?”

“I don’t know. Stuff.” Kame chuckled into Jin’s shoulder. “Maybe someone, once upon a time, danced here just like we do.”

“Maybe some of your folks did. When you lived here.”

“I think they did.” Kame nodded. “Hitomi would like you. She loved music a lot. But I’m thinking of people who used to live here _before_.”

The song had come to its end, the needle jumped and landed outside the imprinted groove. Its slide over paper in the middle of the disc gave a hushed scratch.

Neither Jin nor Kame stopped dancing though, holding tight on to the comfortable bubble the singer’s voice accompanying the music had wrapped them in.

“Mrs. and Mr. Tadashi. They were probably eighty years old, but every Sunday they’d dress up, take a walk to the nearest shrine to pray for their children and grandchildren, and when they came back, Mr. Tadashi would ask his wife to dance with him,” Jin said, making the story up as he went. He and Ryo sometimes did that—not so much lately, though. With the city falling apart more and more, their imagination had been slowly taking a somewhat gloomier direction, and that was simply depressing.

Kame sighed in agreement, and tightened his hold on Jin.

Jin leaned in, rested his head against Kame’s. He didn’t want to let go, not even after distantly noting the music had ended.

“All those albums must be old, really old—like 1950’s, maybe 1960’s old. The kind of old no one bothers to remember now anymore.”

“People shouldn’t forget their own past.”

Jin huffed. “Past is a luxury when you fight for the future though. I know it’s not right, but sometimes, sometimes I think I can understand.” The direction the conversation was threatening to take brought a frown into Kame’s face. Jin felt the change on the skin against his neck. “Back to Mr. Tadashi now.”

“Yes please.”

The story continued with the old, fabricated couple dancing to the tones of music of their youth when the world was so different. Jin had no idea what the life so far back then could have been like—he had no idea what life would have been like at Mr. Tadashi’s time either. For Jin, the two eras were almost equally distant, lost in time.

Kame was right, people should know their own past, and no apocalypse should stop them from learning it.

“… and then, Mr. Tadashi would kiss his wife goodnight. He did it every night for most of their lives…” Jin trailed off. His feet stopped moving.

Kame stumbled, not ready for the abrupt change in their rhythm. Then pulled away, studying Jin’s face with confusion.

Jin swallowed. “Kame?”

“Yes?”

“Is it bad that I want to kiss you?”

Kame stared, his eyes instinctively dropped down to Jin’s lips. They were parted, looking full and soft, a tempting invitation to the kiss Jin was so shyly asking for. A shiver ran down his back. “No. Yes. Why would you—?” Kame pulled away, stepped back to stretch some space between himself and Jin, some space that could contain Jin’s unexpected question.

“I don’t know, I just know I want to.”

Kame blinked. “I— I don’t think I can do that.”

“Oh.” Jin swallowed. He was only a little disappointed, even though logically, he had no reason to be. Everything Kame had done so far could be explained as being friendly. Jin scratched his head, ruffling his hair in the process, and suddenly felt very, very much like an idiot. “Sorry, you are not… I get that. That was stupid. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean—” Kame cut himself off by biting his lip. He was avoiding looking at Jin, and there wasn’t enough space between them, just like a moment ago they couldn’t have gotten any closer. A lifetime ago. “I don’t know what I am or not. I just don’t think I can do… _that_. Kiss someone.”

Pain flickered in his eyes as he said that. It hurt Jin, too, seeing Kame like that and knowing that inadvertently, Jin was the one who caused it, who ruined the moment that had been so close to perfect—perfect moments didn’t happen in this world, but he had somehow managed to have one, and not just because a song recorded a hundred years ago had told him everything was fine. And then he had ruined it. Somehow.

Kame took another step back, inching to the door and away from Jin. “I think… I think I want to, but I can’t.” With one last apologetic look, Kame turned around and left the room, leaving Jin with the cracking of the needle against paper and nonexistent ghost of Mr. and Mrs. Tadashi.

Jin didn’t follow Kame. Not right away.

Instead, he wound the gramophone up again, played the song, over and over again, and stared into the empty space.

 

**

 

When Jin eventually came downstairs, he was half worried Kame might have left. The idea of not having Kame with them anymore was strangely terrifying, despite the fact they hadn’t even known Kame existed until yesterday. Jin really hoped he hadn’t fucked up too much up there. Wanting to kiss Kame. Asking for the kiss. Not stopping Kame on his way out without talking to him first, really talking to him. Explaining— Explaining what exactly?

Jin stopped at the bottom of the stairs and clawed his dark, thick hair. He had tried to cut it last night but he had probably just turned it into a bigger mess than it had been.

Whatever had happened between him and Kame after the dance was confusing and irritating, in a way.

The lack of social interaction he had been exposed to most of his life was finally showing. Things were different with Ryo, the two of them had found a way to simply coexist. With Kame, however, a stranger who had been, more so, through a completely different life experience, Jin was lost. They may have had moments when they seemed to understand each other—but maybe Jin had read too much into those.

Hearing voices from the kitchen, Jin hesitated with walking in just yet.

A relief washed over him, because one of the voices belonged to Kame. He and Ryo seemed to be engaged in a hushed conversation. Jin couldn’t understand the actual words though, and a part of him hoped they were not talking about him.

Probably not.

Earlier during lunch, Kame and Ryo had been only finding a way to each other, taking first careful steps with easy topics, and even though Kame had fit pretty well into Jin and Ryo’s world so far, Ryo’s suspicious nature wouldn’t have allowed for them to become best pals so fast.

Jin’s best guess was on books. The two of them could be very well talking about books. That was a safe topic. And Ryo had been dying to swamp Kame with questions about the library Kame had lived in for sure.

Maybe talking to Ryo had helped Kame forget about Jin and kissing.

Jin groaned internally.

“—and you think this group really exists, right?” Kame asked. He and Ryo were sitting by the fire again, this time, however, side by side instead of across from each other like during lunch. Ryo’s treasured book was lying between them. Jin wondered if they had been reading from it together earlier.

“Of course. Well, I don’t have a physical proof.” Ryo always said that.

Jin knew immediately what the two were talking about. He sighed.

“Is it something you learnt in the Zone?”

“Kind of? The thing is, you hear _tons_ of crap in the Zone. Its streets are a rumor highway, no kidding. The government doesn’t tell you shit about what’s going on, so people just make up their own news. Like, for entertainment, you know?”

“That’s not fair though. Keeping people in dark like that.” Kame paused for a bit, and when he went on, Jin suspected he could guess the reason for the pause just fine. “Jin said some people have never seen… the things outside.”

“If they don’t see them, they can’t get curious,” Ryo shrugged. “Though such policy can easily backfire, since people are curious fucks anyway, and if they know something is being hidden from them, they will try anything to find out. I suppose Jin already shared our little adventure with wanting to see a Mummy attack at the wall.”

“Yeah, he did.”

“Anyway, it’s the same with the Moles. People hear stuff, and start asking questions.”

“And the answer?”

“Pretty damn confusing if you believe _everything_ you hear. Officially, the Moles don’t exist, of course. But then there are other sources. Some will tell you the Moles were behind the virus that fucked up the world, others will say the Moles aren’t even human—”

Kame fidgeted on his seat. Jin knew what Kame’s tensed back looked like by now, and this was the case. Yeah, Ryo’s alien stories could have such effect.

“And you almost want to believe it, because whatever turned people into Mummies sure does sound like some alien shit.” Ryo shook his head. “But honestly, I believe that the Moles are just normal people who were sick of the shit in the Zone.”

“You were sick of it, too.”

“Everyone should be.” Ryo’s indignation brought a smile to Jin’s lips. Talking about the Zone always rubbed Ryo the wrong way and made him want to throw punches. Jin knew—he wanted to do the same. Just knowing the Zone was still out there, stretched across streets and shining into dark nights like a lighthouse, made Jin angry. Deep down, a part of him knew such a place was necessary, and Ryo must have known it, too. Not everyone was fit to live the life the two of them did, no matter how careful they were, they were always putting their lives at risk. Even now. In this house.

Most people wanted to settle and live a safe life, even if it meant they had to give up their privacy and autonomy. Those who were born in the Zone didn’t know better, after all.

Kame wasn’t fit for nomadic life either. Kame wanted a place to call home, wanted to have a bed and decorations.

And Jin had been doing nothing but pulling Kame away from all of it.

Jin closed his eyes, sighed, and finally stepped out of his hiding.

“Here you are.” Ryo heard steps behind his back and turned around to see Jin approach them from the hall.

Unlike Ryo, Kame burrowed himself into silence the moment Jin came out from behind the corner. He sat huddled up on his seat, shoulders rolled forward, head hanging low.

Jin wanted to apologize again, but he couldn’t do it in front of Ryo.

It was the first time in years, maybe ever, that Jin wasn’t sure Ryo would understand if Jin told him.

Ryo’s presence had its merits, too. Jin couldn’t think about much other than helping Ryo with dinner and setting the place for night. It was easier this time round, when they already knew what was necessary. Kame held himself back and out of the way, obviously doing his best not to stay alone with Jin.

After the chicken feast for lunch, dinner was made of dried meat and noodles thrown in a pot and boiled together. Jin added the rest of carrots chopped to slices, too. It didn’t look anywhere near as great as a roasted chicken, but it was surprisingly tasty.

“I was thinking,” Ryo said with his mouth full, trying to fill the silence with words, “Maybe we should clear out one of the rooms tomorrow, set it up a bit. You know, make it comfortable. Get rid of spiders and rodents—I swear I felt something move all over my face last night.” He looked at Jin, then at Kame, his face showing sheer disgust. “We are still staying here for a while, right? That’s the plan.”

Jin laughed. “You just can’t get enough of the showers, huh?”

Ryo shrugged, but the answer was obvious. “What can I say?” he grinned. “Having ice cold water hit me in the face is the best thing that happened lately.”

“And I would think it was the chicken today.”

“Not bad, but nowhere near the cold orgasm in the shower.”

Ryo laughed and Jin joined him. “You’ve always had a way with words.”

“One of my many charms.”

Jin wanted to smack him, but he couldn’t stop laughing. Another one of Ryo’s charms included the fact it was easy to fall for his charms.

“It’s decided then. We’re staying. I should pick a room. And look for more chickens tomorrow.” Satisfied with the development of the events, Ryo scooped a mouthful of meat and pasta, and shoveled it into his mouth.

Hearing the exchange and the outcome, Kame perked up a bit.

Jin expected so much. Kame wanted to stay; he had said so repeatedly. He wanted stability— _a home_.

In his own way, Jin wanted the same, even though he rarely allowed himself to admit it. The whole dream about sleeping in the same bed for the rest of his life, not having to worry about finding a safe place anymore, or about running into Mummies behind every next corner. Jin wanted all that not only for himself, but for Ryo—he had always wanted it for Ryo, and now for Kame, too.

The problem was, they couldn’t have it here. Not in a decaying house with its part already collapsed. Running water or a gramophone were a welcome luxury, sure. No wonder Ryo was raving about the damn shower at every occasion. Jin himself wanted to go back upstairs and see what other music the old cabinet hid under the thick layer of dust. But those, showers and gramophones, those were hardly essential.

Jin put his empty plate down and straightened his back.

“Actually, we should find the Moles.”

Ryo choked on food. “ _What?_ ”

Jin felt Kame’s eyes on him.

“I was thinking about it. You say they exist and that we may be close to their base, and I have no reason not to believe it. Finding them sounds like a logical step to take.”

“For real?” Ryo’s plate with the rest of dinner was forgotten. He had no thought of food anymore. “Are we talking about the same Moles here, right?”

“Are there others, too?”

Ryo laughed. “Not that I know about any.” Forcing his breath to even out, Ryo turned to Jin. “You really want to do it, though? Because I remember two days ago you were joking—” The sentence didn’t see its end, Ryo’s eyes widened in sudden realization. He jerked minutely towards Kame. Kame’s presence was the only thing that had changed since Jin’s resolute dismissal of existence of a place other than the Zone where humanity might had not only survived but could be also thriving. Ryo grinned. “Of course.”

“It’s not like _that_ ,” Jin frowned.

Following the train of Ryo’s thoughts wasn’t difficult.

Jin groaned. Being able to tell what Ryo was thinking, though, meant Jin himself was thinking the same.

Two days ago Jin wouldn’t have considered taking Ryo’s stories about Moles seriously at all. He would have swept them off as a nonsense—he _had_ swept them off, telling Ryo to keep dreaming, because Moles were nothing but a tale. Someone in the Zone had desperately craved a better life and had made up hope to have one someday. Ryo clung to that borrowed hope ever since hearing the rumors, and now Jin was starting to understand, even if for now he did so for Kame.

“Sure.” The grin wasn’t leaving Ryo’s face. “When do you want to leave?”

“You are the expert on Moles here. We go when you say we go.”

“We are leaving?” Kame finally spoke.

Ryo nodded. “Tomorrow. Morning, noon at last.” He hadn’t been this excited since—fine, since finding out he could take a shower last night. But that was different. “No reason to waste time when we are this close.”

“Something you haven’t told me?” Jin looked Ryo over.

“Only stuff I’ve been always telling you.”

Kame nodded conformingly, then quietly got up and walked over to the counter, turning his back to the fire.

Ryo noticed and cast a worried look after him, but Jin shook his head.

He wanted to talk to Kame alone first.

Understanding, Ryo stood up and shuffled away with a meaningful, “I’m going to make the best out of the shower when I still can.”

Startled, Kame looked after him, catching nothing but the door closing behind Ryo’s back. His hands balled in fists were pressing into the edge of the counter.

Jin moved forward. “Kame.”

“We are leaving,” Kame said, swallowing. His voice was raspy and shaky with growing anxiety.

“Yes.”

“You said we would stay. For a while. You said if I stayed with you, we would stay here. Ryo said he would pick a room and clean out spiders because who would want to sleep with weird animals crawling all over you, right? That’s what we all should do. Find a room and get rid of spiders.”

Jin heard the panic in Kame’s voice, and wanted nothing but wrap his arms around Kame and hold him. “I don’t think Ryo cares about spiders anymore.”

“This is a good place to stay.” Shoulders raising with a deep breath, Kame pulled himself off the counter, and turned around. “You know it. It’s safe, you can see what’s going on around. It has water, and… and chickens. Ryo likes it here. You do, too.”

“Kame—”

“It’s a _home_!” Kame cried.

Jin took Kame’s hand. “It’s not a home, Kame. I thought if we stayed here it could be, but maybe Ryo’s way is better.”

“You don’t believe the Moles are real.”

“I believe Ryo.” It wasn’t the same thing, but at the same time, ir sort of was. “He has been talking about them for years and he is not stupid.”

Kame nodded. “He is not.” Warmth radiating from Jin’s hand calmed him down. He was still upset, but he wasn’t shaking anymore and also the tension was slowly leaving his body.

“Their base, or whatever we should call it, might be the safest place. Safer than the Zone even. And from what Ryo knows, they don’t move around, they are settled. Imagine a place where we could live, spend our lives without worries. _That_ would be a home. A real one.”

Something that had never sounded real.

“When we find it, the place, will you stay, too?” Kame asked shyly.

“You and Ryo stay, I stay,” Jin replied without hesitation.

Kame nodded thoughtfully. He wasn’t convinced, not completely. But he seemed to be trying to, and Jin would do everything he could to help him understand that maybe not all the warnings his folks had given him about other people had to be necessarily true.

Jin smiled. He didn’t like to see Kame being sad. And he didn’t like being the cause of it. “I’m sorry about making the decision without asking first. I knew Ryo would agree and thought… I don’t know. The way Ryo and I have been doing things, I know it’s not what you want, but eventually, we would have to leave here anyway. I want to give you a home, Kame, and I believe it could be with the Moles.”

If they were, indeed, real.

Jin sure hoped they were now.

“Thank you.” Kame did something Jin never expected him to, not after the way things had ended between them upstairs. Leaving his hand in Jin’s, Kame threw the other arm around Jin’s shoulder and pulled him into an embrace.

Jin fell into the hug, let Kame hold him, because the hug was as much for Jin as it was for Kame himself.

It wasn’t a kiss, neither was it heading anywhere that way, but for now, Jin would take what he could. It was better than Kame running away from him and keeping his distance.

 

**

 

Dead torsos of the city were towering against the morning sky with heavy dark clouds gathering on the horizon. The sun was lazily blinking through morning mist, but a quickly awakening warm day could be already felt in the air.

Ryo hadn’t slept more than three hours, too anxious to get moving already.

Jin focused on tasks that were necessary. They had a quick breakfast and tea, afterwards Jin packed all their things, went through the ground floor once again, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. They could always come back later, in case they failed to find the Moles, but Jin really hoped it wouldn’t come to it.

Agreeing to Ryo’s desire to search for the Moles had switched something in Jin and now he couldn’t imagine they would find nothing in the end. He had allowed himself hope, something he rarely did, and now he was nervous reality might ruin it somehow.

During all the morning preparations to leave, Kame kept himself quiet and out of the way. He retreated back to his old withdrawn self like yesterday never existed. His chatting with Ryo, his laughter when Jin and Ryo shared stories from their childhood, was nothing but a ghost that would be soon left in the house while they moved on.

One thing Jin liked about being out in the streets was exploring places. It carried a certain level of danger, of course, and not nearly enough precautions could be taken, but every house he saw, every place they passed by, could have been hiding real treasures of past lives and people who had been forced to leave after the infection had broken out.

Ryo dubbed himself their guide for the day, and everyday following until they would either reach the Moles, or give up trying.

To Jin’s annoyance, Ryo was stubbornly refusing to share even a bit of what leads he knew. From little remarks here and there Jin understood they must have been close, but in the end, that could have meant anything. Ryo had been talking about being close to the Mole base since they had left the Zone.

All Jin knew for sure now was that they were heading west, widening the distance between them and the illuminated night sky above the Zone—but also sidling away from Kame’s, _their_ , home with old vinyl albums promising that everything was fine, and running water. Maybe the place was the closest to comfort and luxury and home they could have ever had, and now it was gone. Exchanged for a dream of something even better.

Jin thought if this was similar to how people in the early years after the breakout had been losing their minds. Waiting and expecting something better, something big to happen and bring their old lives back. They had burnt books and spent supplies with no idea how to economize food or other essentials, because no one had taught them how. They had hid money and jewelry until it had become clear those had no longer possessed any real value. Those who still could, had left everything behind and followed the only promise of safe future into the Zones.

When Jin was born years later, life in hiding had already been given structure. In the end, however, structured life wasn’t much better. With Mummies out there, no one could win.

On the third day after leaving the house Ryo finally relented, and once they had set everything for the night and were sitting by fire and sipping tea, he agreed to share some of his secret information.

They were sitting on what once used to be a tiled floor inside a train station. Faded away signs hanging on the walls and some also still stubbornly holding on to corroded bolts were showing directions to places no one travelled to anymore. Further to the right the hall was cut by a line of turnstiles, and behind them, tracks ran in both directions. One side ended after a few feet after leaving the station where the high construction supporting it and holding it above the ground level had collapsed, and the other side was blocked by the roof that had slumped on a train waggon like a vice.

Jin had only taken a brief look earlier to make sure the place was safe and there wouldn’t be Mummies surprising them from the depths of the station in the middle of the night. Nothing particular gave answers whether the roof had fallen down while there had been people inside the train—but probably not. Buildings had started cracking and breaking into pieces a long time after people’s lives had been changed for good.

“There was this guy,” Ryo said, hunched forward on his spot and pausing meaningfully until Jin and Kame followed the example to get closer to him. Then Ryo lowered his voice—which was ridiculous because no matter what big secret he was about to tell, no one but insect and small animals would hear. But that was Ryo. “Back in the Zone. That was when I first heard about the Moles.”

“There were many weirdos talking about the Moles,” Jin shrugged.

“This one was different.” Ryo’s glare clearly told Jin that Ryo would have nothing of Jin’s doubts and negativity this time. “Most people who later babbled about them, made it all sound like the Moles lived in a fucking paradise, or something.”

“They are supposed to live outside the Zone and safe from Mummies. Honestly, sounds like paradise to me.”

“Shut up, Akanishi. You said you wanted to hear this.”

“We do,” Kame said.

Jin took a sip of tea and shut up. “Fine.”

Kame smiled at Ryo. “Go on, please.”

Over the last few days, Kame seemed to have grown to accept the idea of them wandering around in search of the Moles. He and Ryo would sometimes walk side by side and talk, while Jin followed them with a little distance. Trying to figure Kame out.

Kame was obviously keeping some distance between himself and Jin, but whenever they stopped and needed to work together to get everything ready, Kame would easily slip into his role and his place in the little machinery of their small group, and discuss whatever was necessary with Jin. It was now no different from Kame’s behavior the first day they met—and that was, sort of, the problem. Things _should_ be different now. Between then and now lay a whole lot of stuff that had happened and had been said, not to mention stuff that had _not_ happened. Like the dance and the kiss. Like Kame saying he wanted to kiss Jin too, but couldn’t—what the hell did that even mean?

The more Jin tried not to think about it, the more he did, and the more he wanted to grab Kame and shake him until Kame would explain himself.

“So there was this guy,” Ryo cleared his throat. “He never said it clearly, but I think he was one of them. That he was a Mole and had been sent to the Zone for some reason—”

“I sure hope he was there to disintegrate the place from the inside,” Jin muttered.

“Maybe. I thought so, too, to be honest. Maybe he was the one who spread the rumors in the first place. Maybe he hoped more people would listen and act on it. Leave the Zone the way we did.”

“The Zone feeds them and keeps Mummies behind a wall. People aren’t idiots—oh wait, they actually are, that’s why they stay.”

“You are not helping,” Kame reprimanded Jin and slapped his shoulder.

Jin felt a sting of remorse. “Fine. Sorry.” And he was, really—well, sort of, anyway—even though it was simply the way this kind of conversation with Ryo always went. Jin had troubles taking it all seriously.

This time, he told himself he would try.

Maybe he should try more.

Ryo rolled his eyes. “Ignore him, Kame, he can’t help it.”

“I could, maybe I just don’t want to,” Jin smirked.

“Asshole.”

“Christ, Ryo, are you going to tell us anything at all?”

“I’m trying to, if you let me. Thanks.” Ryo made a face. He finished his tea and leaned back, resting against a wall behind him. “Geez.”

Kame glanced across the fire. Jin didn’t look sorry at all now.

“The guy said all we need to do is look for signs. They will lead us all the way to the base. He wasn’t one to share details, but if we find and follow the signs, we will find the Moles.”

“What signs?” Kame asked.

Jin, however, was curious about something else. “Signs, huh? So _all_ this time, all this fucking time, you knew about _something_ —”

“—And I _tried_ to tell you. You can’t blame me for not telling you. I was telling you all this freaking time.”

“You never mentioned _signs_.”

“You never wanted to hear about them. They exist and I think I saw another one this morning. We are definitely heading in the right direction.” Ryo beamed.

“What did you see?” Jin couldn’t believe Ryo hadn’t told anything sooner. Preferably when it had happened.

Kame was reading his mind. “You could have told us something.”

“Yeah, you could have,” Jin agreed.

“I’m telling you now. I didn’t want to say anything until I made sure the signs are real.” As Jin took a breath for another round of but’s and other complaints, Ryo spoke again to stop him. “I know you, Akanishi. Two days without seeing anything and you would have been in my hair!”

“I would not—”

Ryo glared. “You so would. But it doesn’t matter anymore, because now I know they _are_ out there.”

“So what is it? A big red X—no wait, better, a big red M? Painted on corners of buildings, or half buried under crap on the ground?” Jin didn’t even bother with trying to remember if he had seen some sprayed cryptic shit anywhere during their travels, or not. His common sense kept telling him this was all a big waste of time.

The thing was, they had plenty of time to waste, and Kame seemed actually interested about the things Ryo was talking about. And that was enough for Jin to go with it. For now, anyway. Nothing much to lose.

“A handprint, okay?” Ryo pouted. “A handprint somewhere on the façade. That’s why it’s so fucking hard to find them. I imagine many of them have fallen off along with the plaster, and others are lost under vegetation.”

“Like needles in a fucking haystack. Great.”

“But I’ve seen one this morning, so it means there must be more somewhere close.” Obviously, Ryo had made his decision, and there was no way to talk him out of it. “We need to look out for them.”

“Fine, we will start looking.”

Kame didn’t say a word, but with Kame, his silence usually meant he agreed. Or that he didn’t want to disagree, which wasn’t exactly the same thing and Jin really wished to have more information about what was going on inside Kame’s head. He yet had to find a way to get through Kame defenses, though.

Agreeing or not, Kame was an active participant in the search. They didn’t go much systematically about it, just kept their eyes wide open while moving through the streets. Ryo admitted himself that he wasn’t sure what more to do.

“Maybe once we are close enough, they will find us,” Ryo explained. “They will send someone to get us and bring us to the base.”

“Or they will decide to let us wander around for a bit and have a blast spying on us. Maybe that’s what they are already doing.”

“So not happening!”

Ryo gave a jab to Jin’s shoulder.

Today it was Kame who held himself back. Last night, after they had gone to sleep, huddled up around the fire on the floor of the old train station, Kame had somehow shifted around and ended up pressed to Jin, snuggled up against Jin’s back. Jin had been woken up by Kame’s warm breath at the nape of his neck and a funny feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t moved for another half an hour until Kame had stirred awake, realized his—their, position and clumsily rolled away.

With the nights getting occasionally colder now, Jin wondered about suggesting such a setup openly. Sharing body heat wasn’t anything bad, after all.

In the end, Jin didn’t say anything. After a brief debate with himself, he had decided not to alarm Kame by pointing out that he knew what had happened.

And it happened again.

When they slept inside an old school, with desks piled up in front of windows because some of the glass was broken. It happened at three different places, and Jin noticed he had started making unconscious arrangement every night in hope Kame would join his sleeping spot. Jin would spread his mat a little more than what he needed for himself, he would place it closer to fire so Kame would be warm. He never talked about it when they woke up so close to each other that sometimes Kame’s hand was rested on top of Jin’s sleeping bag.

If Ryo noticed, he didn’t show it—safe for occasional glances he stole during the day.

In ten days they found exactly one handprint that Ryo estimated as one of the signs, and then a half of another, that, however, wasn’t so convincing.

The more time passed, the closer Ryo watched Jin, waiting for him to call the whole thing off for being a nonsense right from the start.

Jin wasn’t ready to call anything off yet, though.

 

**

 

“There’s another one!” Jin was crouching at the bottom of a tall building with broken windows and overgrown with viny greenery crawling up its walls, and inside the holes left after glass had shattered out. Shards were crunching under Jin’s feet every time he moved to balance himself on the uneven flooring. “Hey! I’ve got another one here!”

He had almost missed the handprint this time. Its fading yellow color was nearly lost under leaves of wild ivy, tightly rooted in the top layer of grayish render.

The hand leaving it there must have belonged to someone small, maybe a child even. The thought immediately left him with a mental image of the Moles allowing, or even intentionally sending, kids out to the streets. Something unimaginable inside the Zone where children were the means of survival of the human race. Jin looked closer, intrigued, then reached out and pressed his own hand against the wall, aligning it with the imprint. His adult hand with long fingers easily covered the yellow. Made it disappear.

So easy for the signs to be hidden, to get lost from sight of those who searched for them.

Maybe there were others, not just Jin, Ryo and Kame, maybe others were out there, too, wandering the dangerous streets and hoping to find the Moles faster than Mummies would find them.

“Where—where? Show me!” Ryo bounced behind Jin’s back.

Jin pulled the hand away from the wall, revealing the handprint. “Here.”

“Shit, we must be getting really close now.”

It was their fifth sign in three days, and four of them had been found in a perimeter of two streets. Ryo’s excitement was contagious with every new clue located.

“We do see them more often now,” Jin nodded. It could have been a coincidence—a stupid asshole running around the streets and leaving random handprints, because why not, the world had ended anyway. The concept of personal property didn’t exist anymore. The thing was, no one crazy enough to risk their lives to vandalize the little the nature hadn’t yet swallowed and made its own again, would survive long enough to actually do it.

Ryo crouched down next to Jin, touched the sign just like Jin had before.

“I can’t believe we are here only now. All this time we were just…”

“In the neighborhood,” Jin finished. “I know. Remember the summer we ended up in that amusement park? Had we taken the other turn, we might have found these already back then. That is, if you had told me.”

Ryo pouted. “Of course I would have told you!”

The summer had been hot, really, really hot. Brain-melting hot. Jin had wanted to continue due west, but Ryo had been insisting on them reaching the sea. Jin had relented, and they had spent three burning months camping in different parts of a beach, until they had reached the gate of the park and hadn’t left until winter hit the mainland and chased them back into streets where freezing wind wasn’t so strong.

Jin sighed. “I just wish the signs told us more, maybe showed the direction we have to follow. We could be walking in circles for weeks.”

“The guy never said anything about that.”

“Well, he should have.”

Jin kind of hated that he had allowed to be dragged into this, and that he was now _expecting_ the hunt to work out. Expecting the damn handprints to lead them where Ryo said they would.

While Jin and Ryo studied the latest discovered sign, Kame was keeping watch in the middle of the street. He had told Jin two or three days ago that he had had a bad feeling about someone watching them, following them—Jin had dismissed the worry, putting it down on Kame not being used to life in the streets, while Ryo had come to conclusion that the Moles might have had a scout out there spying on them and evaluating any potential danger they could pose.

“Yeah, he should have,” Ryo laughed dryly. As if life hadn’t been hard enough without some cryptic shit.

“I mean, if the Moles want people to find them, why make it _so_ difficult?”

“I don’t know, Jin, alright? I don’t know. But honestly, if you built a community based on cooperation and understanding, science and art, a community that tries to preserve the best of humanity, would you want the dictator fuckheads from the Zone to know where to find you?”

That, actually, made sense. “You think they would do something, though?” Jin wondered. He couldn’t imagine the leaders from the Zone taking any steps that would require leaving the safety of the wall. Who knew, they might have known about the Moles all along, just kept quiet to keep people from leaving to search for them.

“Zoners?” Ryo scoffed. “Can’t imagine them ever opening the gate.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Ryo stood up, straightened his back and rolled his shoulders; his body stiff from the crouch. “But there are people like us, too. People who would love to have an alternative option to the crap in the Zone.”

“The mysterious guy found you,” Jin reminded him.

“Jin?” Kame called from the street. “Have you found anything? Jin! We should go!”

Ryo ignored the shout and grinned at Jin. “I was never really discreet in my resentment for the Zone.”

Jin laughed. Ryo’s description was a huge understatement.

“Jin!” Kame’s voice faltered when he called again. “Ryo!”

“What?” Ryo barked.

Kame fidgeted, looked over his shoulder at something neither Jin nor Ryo could see from their position. Whatever it was, it made Kame twitchy. He rushed across the street and stopped a few steps from where Jin and Ryo were talking. “We need to go!”

“Kame, look.” Jin pulled the ivy aside to show Kame the handprint. “Another one.”

“JIN.”

Kame raising his voice was new. So new that Jin was immediately up on his feet, looking worried. “You alright?”

Kame shook his head, lips pressed tight together. He wouldn’t meet Jin’s eyes, instead, his head kept jerking to the side in repeated glances over his shoulder. “They are here,” he gasped finally.

“The Moles?” Ryo stretched his neck to see what was happening on the street, but the angle was all wrong and their position at the corner didn’t give the best view.

“Mummies.”

It was Jin, almost like reading Kame mind, he knew Kame’s fear when he saw it now. Kame was tense and trembling and hardly holding himself on his feet. For someone living outside the Zone all his life, Kame sure must have had a much safer, Mummy-free childhood and life. It was hard to believe.

“WHAT?” Ryo panicked, too.

“They haven’t seen us, yet, have they?” Jin turned to Kame, grabbed Kame’s shoulders and made the guy look at him. “How far are they?”

Kame’s breathing was coming out in shaky gasps.

“Kame.” Jin didn’t mean to shake him, but he needed to snap him out of it.

Kame whimpered. “Two streets. I saw— I saw something moving there and first thought it was just a dog or something, but then I saw them. Three or four heading in this direction. They know I’m here.”

“Why would they—?”

Jin hadn’t had a chance to tell Ryo about Kame’s theory that the Mummies could _somehow_ sense his presence and followed him, or that they didn’t stop just because he was inside a building. Jin had thought of telling Ryo, more than once, there had been a few occasions to do so, even if Jin had wanted to talk to Ryo without Kame listening, there had been times, late at night, when Kame had been a long time sleeping already while Ryo and Jin had been sitting by a fire and talking or not talking, just like they used to. However, Jin hadn’t brought the topic up even once. He thought about it a lot, sometimes he replayed his first encounter with Kame inside the factory and what had followed over and over again, trying to put some sense into it, Mummies chasing them through the factory hallways, Mummies breaking in in the first place—by now Jin convinced himself he had indeed closed the door just right and thus hadn’t left an open invitation for Mummies, so Kame must have been right when he had said the Mummies had just needed someone to show them what to do to get inside.

Jin knew he owed Ryo an explanation of a lot of things—he also knew Kame hadn’t told him everything yet, which was making any real explaining a bit difficult.

And now wasn’t the right time, anyway.

“Time to go,” Jin decided.

They grabbed their belongings and were turning round a corner to disappear in a maze of side alleys just when the first two Mummies got close enough to see their backs. Ryo glanced back with regret; each handprint they left behind could have been the last one they saw. Running away from a threat might take them off the path leading to the Moles. At the same time they couldn’t take needless risks. They couldn’t focus on searching more signs and following them unless they were safe and had no Mummies at their backs.

For what seemed like the first time in days, Jin was the one in the front, leading the way and assessing the best getaway route. His bag thrown over his shoulder was bumping rather hard against his spine with every hasty step, making moving almost painful, but knowing there were Mummies somewhere around, maybe closer than they thought, there was no thought of stopping and fixing the bag to sit on his back and shoulders right.

Ryo and Kame were close behind him, their laboured breathing mixed with heavy steps and dull thuds of their feet on the pavement.

The street was narrow, running down between two lines of small family houses with two floors and flat roofs, no gardens and no backyards; a neighborhood where, once, if kids had played outside, they had played right on the street. The little greenery its inhabitants had grown on limited space around the walls had turned into a thick jungle, slowly crawling up and swallowing the shabby buildings underneath. In a decade or so, the whole city might be nothing but green wilderness with the Mummies as predators weaving their wobbly way through, hungry for anything still alive by then.

There were theories that the world would go back to normal once the Mummies would die naturally out, but Jin doubted it.

Even if Mummies did die out—they used to be humans once, after all, their bodies must have been aging—who would know? Who would search the streets to confirm they would be gone?

Hardly the Zoners.

People in the Zone might live through two, maybe three generations before someone would get impatient, or desperate, and would open the gate wide. Then, maybe, people would dare walking out into by then empty streets.

Or maybe not. Maybe Mummies were going to stick around for much longer. Maybe the infection would never go away.

Jin had lost any phantom of the sense of streets he might have had after turning round a couple of corners, stepping over overgrown tracks that run and intersected all around Tokyo, and passing what looked like a park. Posters with street names and signposts of all kinds, from directions to places to traffic posts, were of a little to no help. The infrastructure of the city was broken into pieces, trampled in dust by years of no use, and in an unknown part of the city Jin didn’t know which places were safe and which might pose danger.

After what felt like hours of a mix of fast walk and running, Jin finally stopped at another crossroad. His back hurt and a he could feel the spots where bruises would form later. He took the bag down, let it sag on the ground at his feet, and watched Kame and Ryo hurry across the street. Ryo’s shoulders were hunched, head lowered, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his jacket. Kame, on the other hand, was alert. He was looking around, listening, expecting _something_ to happen.

There was no sign of Mummies chasing after them anymore, and Jin was beginning to feel a low buzz of relief spreading through him, warm and kind of numbing.

As they got close, Jin could hear Ryo muttering, cursing Mummies for distracting them when they might have been finally on to something.

“I think we got rid of them,” Ryo announced.

Jin glanced at Kame who didn’t look convinced.

Deciding to give Kame some time to get himself together, Jin nodded. “How about we see if the buildings over there are safe, and settle for the night?”

“Sounds good.” Ryo side-eyed Kame but, feeling Jin’s warning glare, didn’t say anything.

Behind Jin’s back, a clearing overgrown with grass and low bushes was spreading between the street and another built-up area further west. Nearest signposts were indicating the buildings there used to be a campus of the Tokyo University, with auditoriums, dormitories, and a number of libraries.

Unlike the neighborhoods surrounding it, the campus was airy, with big, open spaces between dilapidated buildings. It was almost possible to imagine the place alive, pulsing with everyday routine of students moving from one class to another decades ago. It was a life Jin hadn’t been given a chance to have, or to miss. He was born too late, into the time when thoughts of schools and universities and education were nothing but a foolish dream of a few. Books had been burnt to provide heat and safety from the Mummies, and as soon as the wall around the Zone had been built, university buildings that could have been temporary shelter had been abandoned and left to turn into ruins.

As per their routine, Ryo was the one to pick the building, and even though he pretended to consider also other choices as they walked through the campus, the choice was an easy one.

An hour later they were setting up on the second floor of one of the university libraries. In spite of the fear and anxiety gripping tight on their guts most of the day, Ryo seemed to forget about most of it with the first breath of the dusty, stale air smelling of damp paper and mold. Even with most of the content scattered all over the floor instead of being carefully lodged on shelves, the room they had entered was impressive. Once a gem of modern architecture, it was now nothing but foul walls and rotting wood, electricity wires sticking out of various corners, a heap of bird excrements right under a sad torso of a chandelier, and books, books everywhere, lying on the floor with no order and waiting for their inevitable end.

Jin cleared a spot big enough for them to camp on, brought in a few of the books and wooden parts of what might have been a chair once to start fire. Kame was helping him in silence, taking books in his hands, turning them over to read the titles; some of them sounded technical and really complicated, containing words and characters neither of them had ever heard of.

Ryo contributed with a bare minimum of effort this time, before quickly slipping away to study the books. It was such a difference from the one single book he owned. Jin suspected Ryo didn’t even care what some of those volumes were about, as long as he could read.

Hopefully, the Moles had a decent, well-preserved library in their base.

“I’m going to take a look around,” Jin said. Everything had been set up, the fire would last for a while without being watched, and there was still enough daylight pouring inside through huge windows. The room had two exits leading to two different staircases which would, in case of emergency, provide them space to run.

Ryo acknowledged the announcement with a grunt and a wave of a hand, too busy sticking his nose into battered pages of a massive volume of an encyclopedia.

Jin turned to Kame. “You game?”

He half expected Kame to refuse in order to distance himself from Jin once again now when their work was over, but Kame surprised him by nodding.

“Sure.”

They re-checked the ground floor and all possible access points, doors and windows, Everything seemed secured, one way or another. Jin had double checked multiple times their surroundings before they had entered the library building. He hadn’t seen anything suspicious, neither had he had a feeling of being watched. It was all he could have done in order to stop Mummies from finding their way inside.

Mummies invading the places they spent nights at had become a nightmare that constantly plagued Jin’s night rest.

“This looks safe,” Kame reported as soon as they met at the entry hall again, after having separated to get the checks done faster.

“My side, too. There was only one broken window but I’ve blocked it with a cabinet. Not much else to do, anyway.”

Kame nodded, and they started walking back to the staircase.

“You don’t think they followed us,” Kame said.

“I don’t know. They could have. But honestly, we got pretty far, so there’s probably bigger chance we would run into another group eventually, not the same one. Not that it matters.”

Jin didn’t want to alarm Kame; it was just how things were. With the estimated number of Mummies out there, it was actually a miracle they didn’t encounter some every damn day.

Kame visibly winced at the possible prospect of running into another group any time soon, but he held himself together and nodded again, accepting the possibility as a valid option. It was a tiny step, put on a tough mask instead of letting the panic bubbling underneath show, but Jin’s heart was about to swell with pride.

Kame was tougher than he knew.

Trapped under Jin’s worried, warm stare, Kame stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and leaned his back against a wall. The tiled floor was buried under rubbish, and he poked at it with the toe of his foot.

“What about the signs,” Kame wondered quietly, “do you think we lost them for good?”

Jin had only a vague idea of how to get back to the corner where the Mummies had surprised them. He hoped he would be able to find it, or that Ryo’s orientation sense was better.

“Honestly, I don’t know. But we will find them again.”

“Ryo will want to go back.” Kame wasn’t asking.

“This place will distract him for a while though. We can rest.”

“We will need to move again. This place may have books, but there’s no water.” They had made a quick check of the bathroom upstairs upon their arrival, but the taps were either swallowed up by corrosion and impossible to move, or were missing completely.

Jin knew Kame was right, and it pained him a little that Kame had made that observation and had come to such conclusion in the first place. Kame didn’t like all the wandering, chasing after faded handprints only because Ryo had told them the signs would lead them somewhere.

“We have some in bottles,” Jin said. “We are in no rush.”

Kame fiddled with the stretched out wool on the sleeves of his sweater. “They will come for me.”

Jin stepped closer. Kame watched the move with widened eyes, but didn’t flinch when Jin entered his personal space. “I won’t let them.”

“What if it’s not up to you, though?” Kame avoided meeting Jin’s eyes, his head lowered, his fingers rubbing the edges of his sleeves suddenly an interesting sight to see. “I didn’t lie when I said they can sense me, Jin.”

“Not just you. It’s generally agreed that the Mummies have much better sense of smell than humans. They can smell us all, and follow their instinct to get us.”

Kame shook his head. “I know but—”

Jin’s hands clasped around Kame’s, holding them from trembling and nervous tugging on the sweater. “Kame.”

“—I’m not,” Kame bit his lip.

Again the feeling that Kame wasn’t telling him everything. Jin tightened the hold, his hands warm where Kame’s were cold.

“Kame, look at me. Even if they could do that? You’ve survived all this time, with or without someone watching your back—be it your parents, the people who raised you, or me and Ryo, you were on your own and you are still here. Maybe you are right and for some reason the Mummies want you more than anyone else. But it doesn’t mean they will get you.” Jin brought one hand up to Kame’s chin and pushed gently up, forcing Kame to look up at him. “They can come and try, but they are not getting you.”

Kame swallowed, but his expression softened, his body relaxing under Jin’s promise. “I’d rather if they didn’t come.”

Jin chuckled. “Me too.”

Heavy steps somewhere above their heads sent a shower of dust and crumbs of plaster from the ceiling down on their heads.

“AKANISHI!” Ryo shouted. More plaster fell down. “AKANISHI, IT’S HERE!”

Jin stepped back, let go of Kame’s hand and chin. He didn’t want to; holding Kame, touching him, seemed to have a soothing effect on both of them. Kame was calm now, and if he had been still thinking of Mummies chasing after him, he pushed the worry to the back of his mind. Jin leaned sideway, stretching his neck to see as far as the top of the stairs, expecting Ryo to be bouncing there at any moment.

Instead, Ryo just shouted again. “Akanishi!”

Jin gave Kame a quick grin. “I did expect him to be excited about staying in a library someday, but this is way past my expectations.”

Upstairs, Ryo was moving again. “Jin! I found another one!”

“Another sign?” Kame mouthed, confused.

Jin shrugged, made a face that mirrored Kame’s own questions. “We should find out. Hey, Ryo!” Jin shouted into the space above the stairs. “What the hell are you doing up there?”

In a moment, Ryo appeared at the top of the stairs, a book in his hand, his other hand gesturing wildly somewhere in the direction Ryo had come from. “Jin! I was picking up a book. It was stuck behind a shelf, so I tugged and the shelf moved, and I thought it would fall over and bury me under, but it didn’t and—”

“Ryo.”

“Oh, right, I’m getting there, geez. Let a guy tell you all the details. I pulled the book out when it got loose.” Ryo raised the hand holding the book, as if to demonstrate the action he was talking about, and waved. “I pulled the book out—and it was right _there_. Another handprint. A black one.”

So far all the handprints they had seen were made in either black or yellow paint. Neither color really helped them be visible when everything in the world was turning either gray or brown.

Kame stepped closer to Jin.

“Are you sure?” Jin asked.

“How about you move your ass and come see for yourself? I’m telling you it’s another one. It looks like the others.”

It did look like the others. Black paint in the shape of a hand imprinted on an island of plaster still holding on to the wall. It was half hidden behind a shelf that was dangerously inclining to the side.

“Would you believe it?” Ryo beamed. “I thought we lost it, but it’s here.”

Jin’s eyes found Kame.

“It’s here.”

“What does it mean?” Kame asked.

Good question. A moment ago Jin was afraid they had lost the right direction while running haphazardly through the streets. Now they found another one—in the middle of a territory they knew nothing about. The handprints could be leading them anywhere.

“It means we are leaving early in the morning.” Ryo’s eyes roamed around the room, taking in the books lying everywhere, all the books he couldn’t take with him, that he didn’t have time to read, or at least take in his hands and hold them, feel their presence, and remember that many of the words written on their pages could be a foundation for a newly built civilization.

Without knowledge, people wouldn’t be much different from the Mummies.

Or from those wasting away their lives in the Zone.

“Leaving _where_?”

It wasn’t Jin’s intention to question Ryo’s decisions about the Moles—they all had agreed to give it a try and search for the mysterious community, but now when Jin was once again reminded they weren’t the only ones moving freely in the streets of Tokyo, some changes to the agreement were necessary. They couldn’t afford running into more Mummies, not out in the open where every gateway alley they took could lead them directly into more troubles. And then there was Kame. Today Kame managed to stay calm and strong, he hadn’t frozen the moment Mummies had appeared, he had been self-possessed enough to warn Jin and Ryo in time to give them a headstart.

But that was today.

What about tomorrow, or the day after. The longer Ryo’s blind search kept Kame, all three of them, in the streets, the bigger risk it might pose.

That’s why Jin asked. He needed something concrete. A plan.

Ryo pressed his lips together, drew in a slow breath, waved his hands in an uncertain gesture. “To find more handprints. See if there’s more anywhere close, maybe even right here on the campus. The Moles are supposed to be scientists, maybe their base is near the university. Wouldn’t it make sense?”

“Maybe,” Jin conceded, still thinking. “But it’s not enough.”

Next to him, Kame tensed in surprise.

Ryo gasped to fill his lungs for a sharp retort, but in the end didn’t get a chance to say anything.

“Look, I’m not saying we should give up now. It’s still too soon, and we found this.” Jin pointed at the handprint. “So if these pictures really lead a way to something, we shouldn’t stop looking. Just…”

“We need a map.”

Jin blinked. “What?”

“I remember where most of the other signs were. If we draw them into a map, we could maybe see a pattern, or something.” Ryo bounced around the room, raking the books and papers on the floor with his feet, turning them over. “Goddammit, we’re in a library, they must have maps here.”

Quietly, Kame joined Ryo instead of questioning anything.

Jin had noticed already before how Kame always did his best to help, even though by now Jin suspected Kame did it to please, not because he fully understood what was going on and why certain tasks needed to be completed.

They searched the room and one more, a smaller study across the hallway right next to one of the staircases, while the setting sun was quickly reducing the light. They worked fast and after some discussing also systematically, looking for anything with a map of Tokyo. At first Ryo tried to treat all less damaged books with care, putting them carefully to the side, possibly making mental notes to flip through their damp pages later; but once the sun was halfway down behind the nearest building and the room fell into soft dusk casting shadows over the layers of books scattered around, Ryo gave up on his side quest of book preservation and focused all his energy on finding what they were looking for.

Jin found a world atlas rotting under a pile of other books, but besides the pages being discolored from water damage, none of the maps inside seemed to focus on Tokyo alone. Jin managed to guess a location of Japan on one page, but it was nothing but a brownish smudge surrounded by faded blue and green. Cursing, he tossed the atlas back on the floor.

The growing lack of sunlight was worrisome.

Their flashlights were safely tucked in their bags right in the other room where the temporary camp had been set up, but Jin didn’t like the idea of burning batteries for non life threatening reasons.

They might need to continue the search tomorrow. Or maybe they should go out and look around for a water source. With water nearby, they could stay in the library for a few days and keep looking.

“I think I got something!” Kame called, saving Jin’s brain from further strategy planning. Having a concrete agenda was turning out to be complicated. In many ways, things were much easier when the only goal was to stay alive and ensure food.

“Where?” Ryo jumped up on his feet and hurried across the room.

Kame was bent above a massive desk, wiping rubbish off its flat surface. Books and plaster crumbs fell on the floor with a soft, moist thud, and by the time Ryo reached the table, a slightly blurred plan of the Tokyo streets lying under a cracked, thick board of glass, was mostly visible.

Jin joined the other two when Ryo was already hunched over the old map, his finger tracing lines of streets and green patches of parks and gardens.

Underneath the glass, the paper survived in quite a good condition, dampness from the air sneaked only around the edges and where the glass was cracked.

“I should probably go get a flashlight,” Ryo announced. He couldn’t see himself leaving the map any time soon, or at least until he got some answers.

“I’ll get it,” Kame offered.

Jin considered staying too, if for nothing else but out of curiosity—besides a few simple plans of train lines that had survived inside stations, he had never seen a map of Tokyo, the city he had spent his whole life in, the streets that helped him survive as well as threatened to cost him his life had he not been careful enough. But just seeing Ryo so completely drowned in studying the map, Jin accompanied Kame outside the room and back to the other one.

While Kame went to bring Ryo a flashlight and a spare battery just in case, Jin started preparing food and assessing their supplies.

Having an extra bag in their little group was a plus. They could carry more weight now and didn’t need to worry about lack of food; as long as they were able to find places that hadn’t been looted years ago, either by people during the first, desperate months after the outbreak, or by wild, hungry animals that had been left to provide for themselves on their own.

Kame returned, slipping quietly through the door and taking a seat close to the fire.

“Any chance Ryo will join us for dinner?” Jin asked, half joking.

Kame cracked a smile and glanced up over the fire. “Not until he’s done connecting all the dots he is making on the map right now.”

“At least we don’t need to worry about him getting too attached to all these books here.”

“He probably forgot we’re in a library the moment he saw the handprint,” Kame agreed.

Jin stirred the contents of a small pot sitting in the fire. He mixed some noodles and dried beef, used one of the bottled waters Ryo had in his bag. In another pot sitting right next to the first one, tea was just about to boil.

“Then it’s just the two of us,” Jin grinned.

Kame’s smile didn’t disappear, didn’t even falter, and that was, Jin quickly concluded, really great progress.

Ten minutes later they were sitting side by side, chopsticks in their hands, and were dipping into the pot, scooping mouthfuls of warm noodles. Sometimes their hands would meet on their way to the pot, and they gradually progressed from pulling back and letting the other have the first take, to unsure, teasing pokes to get the other out of the way, to eventually timing their moves to have a collision and start a little wrestle. More than once it looked like they might topple the pot over.

Jin realized the atmosphere reminded him of the time it used to be only him and Ryo, and the thought made him grin.

Sometimes, more often than not, Kame seemed to be so unsure of how to act around other people, that it was a nice change to have him behave so freely and easily.

When they finished, Jin got up, pulled his sleeves over his palms and picked up the warm pot, trying not to burn himself. “My turn to be Ryo’s servant.”

Kame slipped a pair of chopsticks into the pot before Jin could take it away.

With the food in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Jin left the room to feed Ryo who, just like Jin expected, had fully submerged into noting down the places with the handprints as accurately as he could remember. Jin caught him in the middle of drawing an X, and Ryo didn’t bother acknowledging either Jin’s presence, or the tasty smelling noodles and sauce placed on the edge of the table.

Jin shrugged and returned to Kame.

Ryo would join them eventually, and hopefully have some answers and ideas about what their next move should be.

Without admitting it, Jin just hoped whatever Ryo would come up with wouldn’t want them to turn back and go where they had come from. Moving forward into unknown neighborhoods and streets always felt like they were doing _something_ , while going back meant moving in circles. Add the anxiety about the Mummies just _waiting_ for their return, lurking around the very corner where Jin, Ryo, and Kame had managed to get lost from their sight.

Kame was standing by the window, hidden in shadows where the fire light wouldn’t reach him anymore. He was a dark silhouette against the night sky outside, and a blurred face reflecting in the window glass. His posture shifted the moment Jin entered the room, his shoulders straightened and his eyes fixed on Jin’s own reflection moving in the window. The closer to Kame Jin got, the clearer the outlines and then also details of his face became.

“Maybe we could try to find a roof door, if there is any,” Jin suggested, interpreting Kame’s staring as longing for seeing the stars again.

Probably not, though, because Kame shook his head.

“They know I’m here,” Kame mumbled. “They can feel me.” He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered, even though Jin himself couldn’t feel cold. “And I can feel them. Waiting in the streets. It confuses them when I’m not outside, because the trace fades, sometimes vanishes even, but then it’s back. It’s always back eventually, because I can’t stay at one place. I try—I _tried_. But ever since Hitomi and the others died, I had to start moving around again to survive.”

Kame’s fear felt so deep rooted that Jin quickly decided against once again assuring Kame that his worries about being a target of the Mummies was a nonsense born from years of isolation and loneliness. Kame truly believed what he was saying was true, and arguing with him about the matter wouldn’t bring any good.

“Soon you won’t need to move places anymore,” Jin said instead, watching Kame in the glass. “As I know Ryo, he won’t go to bed until he finds some logic in the signs left by the Moles. And after we find the base, you can never put a foot outside.”

Kame held himself tighter. “I don’t know if I should go there. When Ryo finds the place. I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“Of course it’s a good idea. You’re not staying outside.”

“Hitomi said I should keep myself away from humans.”

Without thinking, Jin opened his arms and pulled Kame against his chest, locked him in an embrace, and held. “Bullshit. Whatever Hitomi meant by that, she wasn’t talking about the Moles. You said it yourself, your folks never even mentioned them, so if they warned you about other people, they meant the Zone. That’s what I would do, anyway.”

Kame was quiet, but he didn’t try to pull away from Jin. In fact, in the next moment Jin felt Kame’s weight lean into him.

“You don’t know that,” Kame protested weakly, by now probably just out of habit.

Jin turned his head a little, and brushed his lips over Kame’s temple. “I know I’m not leaving you. When we find the Moles, you’re staying with me. With us.”

“I don’t want to cause troubles.”

“The only trouble you could possibly cause would be making me worry about you if you stayed outside.” Jin wasn’t surprised when he realized how truly and deeply he meant those words. “I’m not letting it happen. Get that into your head finally, Kame.”

In his arms, Kame fidgeted and turned around to face Jin. Jin’s hands touched the small of Kame’s back, itching to drop just a few inches lower.

“No one worried about me, not after Hitomi—”

Jin smiled. “Then you better get used to it again.”

“Thank you.”

Kame didn’t move, didn’t make any attempt to hold Jin back, to wind his hands around Jin, too, but Jin didn’t care at the moment. He would take anything as long as Kame wasn’t pulling away or running off. He wasn’t completely relaxed either, though.

“What if they don’t let me stay? What if the… the things come for me and the Moles will decide it’s too much of a risk to have me there?”

Jin’s smile quickly morphed into a frown. “Kame. That’s not gonna happen. You aren’t different from me or Ryo.”

Jin moved his hand, drawing small, soothing circles over Kame’s lower back. Kame’s hands were bent in elbows and squished between their bodies.

Jin pressed another kiss to Kame’s head, this time to the top of his hair.

Against Jin’s expectations, the simple touch of lips didn’t send Kame across the room in panic. Instead, he drew in a long, shaky breath, then slowly exhaled, his arms sliding down along his hips and his body melting against Jin’s.

Jin felt his own lips stretch into a smile.

Just like with searching for the Moles, he had time. He could give Kame all the time in the world, let him take the smallest of steps, find the pace he felt most comfortable with. They didn’t have to kiss today, or tomorrow. Hell, as long as Kame was there, Jin was happy.

“You still want to kiss me,” Kame mumbled.

Once again Jin wondered if the other could, by a chance, read minds. Then he shrugged it off.

“I do.”

Kame looked up, eyes landing on Jin’s parted lips. Jin, feeling a bit twitchy under such scrutiny, pressed the lips together and swallowed.

Bringing a hand up, Kame brushed the tips of his fingers over the soft, dry pillows of Jin’s lips, pressed his fingers against the lower one, testing, feeling, unintentionally driving Jin a little mad. Jin suddenly didn’t remember how to breathe, or that breathing was actually important.

Then the fingers were gone.

“I wish you could,” Kame said so quietly that Jin first thought the voice was only inside his head. Then Kame was pulling away, slipping out of Jin’s hold. “It’s not safe, though.”

“What is it?”

Kame had implied something similar already before, but Jin wasn’t getting what the problem was. Clearly, Kame _did_ want them to kiss, too. His eyes on Jin’s lips were speaking volumes, as well as the sadness in his voice when he tried to find reasons why such a kiss wasn’t a good idea.

Jin, on the other hand, couldn’t find a single reason—one that would make sense, anyway.

“You can tell me.”

Kame bit his lip, then shook his head. “It’s not so easy. Maybe—maybe if we find the Moles, they will know what to do. Ryo says they are scientists, right?”

“Why would you— Are you sick?” Jin did his best to stop his brain from imagining the worst possible scenarios.

“No. Yes.” Kame sighed. “I don’t know. Really.”

Jin wasn’t breathing again. “The Mummies? They didn’t—did they—?”

“No. Not like that.”

A relieved exhale came out of Jin. Good. So not the worst case scenario. That was not happening. A huge, heavy boulder was lifted off Jin’s shoulders, one that he couldn’t remember sagging down on him and weighing him down. It must have been there all along, getting heavier and heavier every time Kame’s behavior around the Mummies had seemed off, every time Kame kept something from Jin, the things he wasn’t saying and Jin could tell there was something worrying him.

Jin nodded. “Alright. I thought—”

“I know. I’m not turning into— I’m just not. I don’t think I am.” Kame was nervously scraping his lower lip with his teeth. He hadn’t made it farther than a step or two away from Jin, and now he looked a little lost, indecisive whether to take another step back, or go back to Jin and let those strong arms hold him a little longer.

With no Kame to hold, Jin’s arms were hanging at both Jin’s sides, too long and itching to do something, move and reach out, pull Kame close again, or disappear inside the pockets of Jin’s pants. Jin had always felt a little awkward when he didn’t know what to do.

“You know, I wouldn’t allow it,” he said finally.

Kame tilted his head. “Allow what?”

“You turning into one of those things. I just wouldn’t allow it to happen.” It was childish and said aloud probably sounded even more stupid than the voice inside Jin’s head repeating those words like a mantra for the last few heartbeats. “I’m no scientist and I’m probably not even that smart—”

“Don’t say that!” Kame protested sharply.

“—It’s not like there are schools or universities, or even just libraries like this one, in the Zone,” Jin continued, offering Kame a weak smile as thanks for not seeing him as stupid, “And I left that place before I learnt everything important, anyway.”

“You know how to survive, though. Who cares about quadratics—math won’t feed you or keep you warm in winter.”

Jin almost laughed, suddenly thinking of all the algebra textbooks someone had, most probably, burnt to save themselves from freezing at some point after the breakout.

“Can you shut up, I’m trying to say something here.”

Kame made a guilty face.

Jin took a breath. “I’m just saying that I would do _anything_ to save you from the infection. I’m not letting them get you, Kame.”

His words were met with slowly widening eyes, and for the first time since he had approached Kame in the darkened corner of the room, Jin wished to see clearly and be able to read in those eyes.

Kame hugged him, pressed himself against Jin; this time there were no hands between them as a barrier, and Jin hoped the soft touch against his cheek was real—Kame’s lips brushed his skin.

 

**

 

They didn’t wait for Ryo.

Jin didn’t expect his friend to be back any time soon. First he thought of going to the other room to check on him and if necessary, pull him away from the map and force him to rest for a bit, but then he and Kame started talking by the fire and Jin, as guilty as he felt about it later, forgot Ryo wasn’t there with them.

They shared more stories from their past, most of them with no real significance, just random observations they had made on their wanderings through the Tokyo streets. Animals they had seen, buildings they had passed and those they had slept in—obviously, Jin’s experience with the latter was far broader than Kame’s, but Kame had proved to be a good and eager listener. He could sit for long hours and do nothing much but watch and listen to Jin talking.

Jin probably hadn’t spoken so much in months, but he wasn’t complaining.

The fire kept them warm and provided just enough light for them to see each other, shadows accenting even little changes in their expression when something the other said particularly caught their attention.

Jin liked it when Kame talked about his adoptive family, about the strange bunch of people who used to work in a lab and who, in spite of having been just as lost as everyone else when the infection had broken out, had decided to take care of an abandoned baby and raise him as their own.

It was so different from the way people had started treating kids in the Zone. Kame’s folks had created a family out of strangers, while the Zone had given up on the concept of family whatsoever, pushing people to procreate but not form emotional bonds.

When they were both more yawning and dozing off than talking, Jin decided to call it a night. The fire was burning low, illuminating the room with soft flickery light. The floor around it had been carefully cleared from books and anything else that might accidentally catch fire during the night. Ryo had a flashlight and could get himself to bed on his own.

Worrying about Ryo’s possible lack of sleep was the first time in hours that Jin remembered his friend—and immediately felt remorse about it.

Across the fire, Kame was preparing his sleeping bag, moving slowly with tiredness and chewing on his lower lip for a reason Jin learnt a moment later.

Jin was lying on his side, snuggled up under a blanket that wouldn’t be enough next month when the summer temperatures would start dropping. His thoughts were scattered all over the place. Between their search for the signs left by the Moles, the Mummies chasing them through streets, and his very slowly progressing relationship with Kame, Jin wondered if his brain would ever get a pause.

With his eyes closed and mind occupied, Jin didn’t notice at first that Kame moved around the fire and stood above him.

Jin opened his eyes only when he heard feet shuffling and a distant mutter that he first thought to be Ryo announcing his return. Instead though, his sight fell on Kame crouching by his side, the sleeping bag crumpled and gathered in his arms.

“Kame?” Jin rubbed his eyes, blinking against the darkness.

“Is it alright if I sleep here tonight?”

Jin pushed himself up on an elbow. “Of course. You don’t need to ask.”

He wasn’t even referring to those nights before when Kame had occasionally ended up pressed against Jin, though Kame seemed to be thinking about it. He looked away, and had there been more light, Jin might have noticed the brighter shade of pink creeping up into Kame’s cheeks.

“I don’t want to cause discomfort,” Kame mumbled, spreading the sleeping bag close to Jin. “It’s just…” He shrugged.

“Hey. Today’s been tough. No problem. Come here.”

When Kame finally slipped into the bag, leaving about a foot wide space between himself and Jin, Jin rolled his eyes, grabbed the slippery material of the bag and tugged it closer, all the way to his sleeping spot.

Kame gasped in surprise and wriggled a little, until Jin rolled over, pushed himself into a half-sitting position and hovered over him.

“I think we both will sleep a little calmer tonight like this,” Jin smiled, pressed his palm against Kame’s chest, and then rolled off, back into his sleeping space.

Kame was quiet for a while. Then Jin heard rustling as Kame moved and writhed about, like he wanted to snuggle up to Jin but didn’t dare, only to end up on his back and staring at the ceiling. “Good night.”

Jin smiled to himself. “Night.”

He already knew it wouldn’t take much for Kame to fall asleep and curl up against Jin’s side. Unconsciousness always won the battle Kame was fighting with himself.

Tonight it happened faster than any other night before.

Despite his exhaustion, Jin couldn’t fall asleep no matter how much he willed himself to. Closing his eyes didn’t help. Evening his breath out didn’t help. Thinking about the hope lying somewhere in the near future didn’t help either. Kame breathing steadily into his shoulder was more a distraction than something to help Jin sleep.

The sounds coming in from the outside were only making it worse.

Jin pulled Kame closer, for once not afraid the other might pull away. They both needed to get cleaned and rub the sweat and dirt of the last few days off their skin. Jin missed the shower, with its freezing water and mold growing up the walls, and everything else that came with it. An old, crumbling bar of soap, wet hair, freshly washed skin smelling of citruses and some exotic crap Jin had never smelled before and didn’t even particularly like, but it was still better than being sticky with sweat and unable to get it off.

No matter what Ryo found in the map, Jin decided in his half asleep but still too wide awake state, the first thing they would do was find a water source big enough for them to just jump in without thinking too much.

He might have spent a half of his life on the streets, but it didn’t mean Jin wanted to meet the Moles looking, and smelling, like a vagabond.

Kame sighed, curled up against Jin’s side, and Jin almost thought he would be able to finally doze off like that.

But he couldn’t.

Kame’s sigh turned into a whimper, then another one, and before Jin realized what was going on, Kame was mumbling unintelligible words, writhing and kicking around in his sleeping bag, fighting someone, or something, in his dream that, from what Jin could see, must have been more like a nightmare. Kame thrashed around, alternately screaming, “No!”, until his voice jumped into a croak, and calling Jin’s name.

Not knowing what exactly to do when gentle rubbing and repeating Kame’s name quietly didn’t help, Jin pulled Kame tight against his chest and pressed his lips to Kame’s sweat-damped forehead.

Still unaware of his surroundings other than the grip holding him, Kame stilled.

“Shhh, it’s alright, you are safe,” Jin whispered.

“I can feel them,” a broken voice mumbled into Jin’s chest. “They know I’m here.”

Jin wanted to protest and assure Kame once again there was no way the Mummies could be after him. But before he found words that might have come through the haze of Kame’s sleepy state, the breath against his chest evened out. Jin felt the warm, wet puffs through his shirt where the zipper on his hoodie wasn’t pulled all the way up.

Waiting for another round of Kame’s nightmares to soothe them and give Kame a few extra hours of rest, Jin finally fell asleep.

He couldn’t have been sleeping long when an itchy feeling of something being very, very _wrong_ pervaded the numbness of exhaustion, and Jin blinked his eyes open into a misty, pale light of awakening morning. Kame’s weight was still on the top of him, their legs laced awkwardly over the bags they were tucked in. Jin sighed and kissed the top of Kame’s head, not trying to wake the other up, but simply because Kame was still there and Jin wasn’t awake enough to think twice about his action. He didn’t think Kame would mind.

Jin almost allowed his mind to drift off, back to last night and Kame’s lips brushing hastily against Jin’s cheek.

There was something lingering in his peripheral vision.

“Have you slept at all?” Jin groaned. “Tell me you at least know where to go next.”

“Jin?” Kame moved, woken up by the sound of Jin’s voice and surging of the chest he used as a pillow.

“Nothing, Nishikido forgot about his bedtime. He’s gonna be a bigger zombie than Mummies today.”

Kame fidgeted some more, poking Jin in the ribs.

“Ryo?” Jin struggled up on his elbows, blinking through the faint morning light. He could distinguish a figure standing in the doorframe. “What is it? Did you find something?”

Kame moved again, pushed himself up and off Jin.

“Jin, we need to go.”

“What—?”

Kame tugged roughly at the sleeping bag. “We need to move. It’s not Ryo.” The urgency in the whisper was what got Jin’s attention. The crust of morning sleepiness broke with the sudden pounding of his heartbeat. He kicked his legs, getting out of the sleeping bag while blindly fumbling for his shoes.

The shadow in the door wasn’t moving.

“We need to find Ryo,” Jin’s voice trembled. His mind went through all the things he hadn’t packed back into his bag last night and that he didn’t have time to gather anymore. He grabbed one of the bags, hoping it was one with water and batteries, and rose on his feet, pulling Kame up along.

Kame flailed for his shoes lying nearby, and let out a little yelp when Jin tugged him up with more strength.

The moment Kame was moving, the shadow stepped in the room, and in the light coming in through the windows, the dark form gained clear shapes and all gory details. White face with skin peeling off and revealing open scratches oozing yellow-brown pus mixed with dark blood, sagged mouth with shrunk, tight skin around and teeth bared. The strange tilt of the body, giving Mummies their characteristic limp. Clawed out hands were hanging loosely down the sides, fingers twisting and stretching in convulsion—almost like a nervous twitch, like the creature was thinking hard what to do next now when it had reached its goal.

“The other door.” Jin was right next to Kame, the bag in one hand, his other hand gripping Kame’s arm. “We need to get there. Then you run and I’ll get Ryo.”

Kame tensed. “No.”

“I can’t leave him here, I need—”

“And I’m not leaving you here, Jin!”

A loud crash came from somewhere downstairs, distracting the Mummy for a shred of a second. It twisted its neck over it’s shoulder to assess the situation.

Plenty of time for Jin to push Kame towards the other exit. They stumbled their way through the heaps of books and broken furniture, their feet slipping on paper and sinking into the rotting rubbish.

Another set of steps followed tight behind them, joined by low, guttural groans. Jin could almost feel the claws reaching out and scraping his back, grabbing his shoulder and jerking him back. His heart pounded loud and strong in his chest.

He wasn’t letting a fucking Mummy get him, not now.

It was like a repeat of the day he and Kame had met. There was light this time though, they could see where they were heading.

And they weren’t so vastly outnumbered.

“Down the stairs!” Jin shouted once they made it to the hallway. “Take this!” He handed Kame the bag in a rush, pushing him further forward, towards the staircase at the other side of the building. “I’m right behind you.”

“Jin, no! Don’t—!”

“ _Kame, go!_ ”

Kame staggered on the top step. If there had been anything else he wanted to say, he didn’t say it.

Jin hated himself for pushing Kame away. Even though it was the only way to keep him safe he could think of at the moment.

And just like that, Jin was alone. He slammed the door behind himself, cutting off the easiest access to the room. A loud bang signaled the Mummy didn’t stop and ran right into the door. Jin was gripping the knob with a little more strength than probably necessary. Putting on some more and he might screw the knob off. His breath was coming out in short gasps, his lungs desperate for oxygen, but his chest was too tight to stretch enough for them to fill right.

Fuck.

The… _thing_ had fucking crept in while they had been asleep. Through the main door and up the stairs. If Jin had had any lingering doubts about Mummies and their ability to enter buildings, they had just disappeared. A Mummy had been watching them for god-knew-how-long. It could have attacked them, it could have caught them by surprise and torn them into pieces. A single scratch and they could have been infected.

Jin tried to breathe.

Things could have been _much_ worse.

They had warded off the first crisis. Kame was safe, Kame got outside and there were plenty of places to hide, and now there was a door between Jin and a terrifying face with glazed over eyes and bared teeth and sharp, strong claws. He just needed to find Ryo.

A sound rattled at Jin’s right and he snapped his head to check the far end of the hallway.

More Mummies were pouring up the main staircase, bumping into each other, stumbling on the stairs whenever their feet didn’t lift high enough.

“Ryo!” Jin called, his voice jumping up an octave. “RYO!”

Nothing, just dull steps and low grunts.

Claws scratched down the other side of the door behind Jin’s back. The Mummy inside kept trying to paw its way through.

No wonder people believed Mummies lacked any significant level of intelligence.

“RYO!” Jin threw himself at the door on the opposite side of the hallway, the door behind him immediately cracked as the Mummy trapped behind it pushed forward once again, this time finding no resistance. A hand reached after Jin, missing his shoulder by mere inches. Jin burst into the room. Morning sun filled it with soft light that danced over books lined up on shelves and lying on the floor. Jin glanced to the table where he had last seen Ryo last night.

The place was empty. The table stood there as it had before, cleaned off all rubbish. A wrinkled page of paper, a pen, and an empty pot with chopsticks sticking out were the only reminder of Ryo’s all-night mystery solving.

Ryo, though, was nowhere to be seen.

A cold shiver ran up Jin’s spine.

“NISHIKIDO!”

Claws grated the door behind him again, the noise cutting deep into his skin. Jin’s eyes flicked around, assessing the situation. A hallway full of Mummies, with more possibly coming, and a room with no other exists. No furniture close enough to reach out for and block the door. All he could do was stand there, clutch the knob and hope for a miracle.

“Nishikido, where are you?” Jin called again, even though he was slowly accepting the fact that Ryo wasn’t there.

Jin swallowed a cry.

Ryo couldn’t be—

The door behind him shook violently under a pressure of the body mass pouncing at it on the other side. The Mummies knew about him. Knew he was there and were coming for him. They hadn’t lost interest the moment he had hid from their sight.

They _knew_.

Kame must have been right and they didn’t hunt at random. They didn’t stop just because whoever, whatever, they chased disappeared behind a corner, or behind a door.

Jin closed his eyes, evened his breathing. He would think of something, he would find a way out of this. It was only the second floor, after all. Maybe if he made it to the nearest window and jumped out, he would land on the ground outside without breaking his neck—or anything else. Maybe he would be able to get into safety with a sprained ankle…

Bad idea.

Really, really bad idea to even consider willingly jumping off a window.

“Fuck.”

His mind was blank though.

The bangs at the door weren’t relenting any.

Then the old wood gave in and with a loud, nerve wrecking crack a clawed hand sliced the board, cutting through just by Jin’s shoulder.

Jin jerked away—only to be stopped by another claw ripping the door at the other side. The pounding got vigorous, the Mummies clearly encouraged by their progress, as well as the fresh smell of their prey, now stronger than it had been over the closed door.

A different noise, something sharp and heart stopping, torn through the building. Jin was vaguely aware of it, even thinking it sounded a little like a rifle shot, but it couldn’t have been. Mummies couldn’t be shot; shooting them would only spread the infection. Why would anyone risk it? It was no different from getting yourself bitten. Either way, everyone in the near proximity who would get in any kind of contact with infected body fluids would be turned.

Jin didn’t want to be turned. Not now.

He wanted to reunite with Kame and Ryo, and wanted to find the Moles. God, he really wanted to find the Moles and wanted to stop running.

More and more clawed hands came through the holes in the door. Flipping around, fumbling blindly to touch the body they knew was there. It wasn’t safe to stand there any longer.

Maybe jumping off the window wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.

Jin lept forward, aiming for the nearest window. He could make it—this wasn’t the first time he was running away with Mummies so close behind him.

He would find Kame. Ryo would be alright.

The Moles must have been somewhere close. They would get to the base.

It would be all real.

Distantly, Jin heard a clamour in the hallway. Loud thuds and strangled screams, a weird, hissing sound.

A gust of smoke and gas wafted through the air.

Something sharp pierced through the back of Jin’s leg.

Jin fell forward face down, wet, rotting paper splashing into his cheek. Pain shot up his leg and hip, and everything was too bright and too dark at once. As he opened his mouth to cry out, poignant stench of decay filled his lungs.

The riot had gotten closer, moved from the hallway to the room.

Jin heard it, but his leg was burning from within and he couldn’t care about anything else. The worst scenario was rolling over and over in his head. All those gory stories he had heard as a kid, about Mummies tearing people into pieces, about other people turning into those creatures after having been injured. No one in the Zone had ever tried to find out what was the cause of those changes. No one knew how it happened. It just did.

Ryo had been collecting theories since Jin could remember. An experiment gone wrong. Bioterrorism. Aliens. God’s punishment. The options were endless, and Jin never knew enough to be inclined to just one.

In the end, Jin didn’t need to know. What did it matter, anyway. Mummies were an inescapable part of the world.

The pain in Jin’s leg and the burning itch spreading from the open cut on his calf, however, were an inevitable sign that Jin might learn a thing or two soon.

A shiver of terror ran through him at the realization.

At least Kame had gotten out of there. Kame would be alright, he would find a place to hide. He and Ryo would keep searching for the Moles together.

Jin refused to consider the chance Ryo’s situation might be the same, or very similar, as his own.

The world around him, above him, was quickly turning into a blur. For a brief moment Jin almost wished one of the claws ripping through the door had ripped through him as well. He didn’t want to change into one of them. He really didn’t want that.

Through the stench of moist, decaying paper and mold, Jin’s nose was suddenly hit with another smell—sickly sweet smell of burning flesh; a stink so strong and thick he could almost taste it at the back of his palate. He groaned. His instincts were screaming he should curl up to protect himself, but his body refused to cooperate. Maybe his body just knew it was too late for that. His ínjured leg was twitching. How long until he would stop being aware of the change? Or would he stay somewhat conscious while his morphed body would be creeping around in the streets?

Would Kame or Ryo have to burn him someday?

_Burn._

Something was burning—that was the other smell.

Hopefully one of the Mummies had stumbled into the fireplace in the other room and spread the fire around. This whole building had better burn down to ashes with everything inside.

“He’s here! Over here! Hurry!”

“Jin…? JIN! Oh god, no, this is… Don’t do this, Akanishi!”

Ryo.

Jin swallowed dry. He couldn’t move, his whole body was too heavy. He couldn’t feel his hands, his torso—nothing but the pain in his leg.

But he could hear Ryo’s voice. Ryo was worried and he was there. He didn’t sound like a Mummy, either.

“Jin, _please_.”

And Kame.

Jin wanted to cry. If this was only a dream, his last dream before his consciousness slipped away completely, he would take it, too, though he wished it was more.

A hand touched his leg, a palm gently soothed the length from his thigh down to the blood gushing cut.

“You will be fine, Jin,” Kame promised, his words choked.

“SOMEBODY HELP US HERE!” Ryo shouted impatiently.

And Jin must have been dreaming, because there was another voice, one he had never heard before. So it must have been a dream, nothing else. Fuck. This wasn’t fair.

“He’s been injured, we can’t take him in.”

Of course, even in Jin’s dream, Ryo was having none of that. “We are not leaving him here. He’s fine. Right, Jin? You are fine.” Hands were pulling Jin’s limp body up, ripped pages stuck to the front of his clothes. Another pair of hands brushed those off. Jin blinked his eyes open just long enough to recognize Kame’s hands supporting him from the left while Ryo was holding most of his weight on the right.

“We need to get him out of here. Get the cut treated,” Kame said.

Jin tried to stay awake to follow the conversation. Maybe to understand what was going on. Who was the other person speaking and how had Kame found him so fast, and where had Ryo been. They had never parted ways without discussing it first. They had never disappeared in the middle of the night to have the other worry sick in the morning.

Something was wrong here.

Nothing made sense, and for once Jin dared to believe the burn in his leg wasn’t the reason.

There were people. _Other people._

He and Ryo had gone years without meeting anyone.

He opened his mouth to ask, to find out what was happening, but his throat was dry and raw and he couldn’t really remember how to form words.

“We’re taking him with us,” Ryo decided. “Just burn this whole place down. In case some of those fuckers crawled into a corner and survived.”

“You’ll be fine,” Kame repeated quietly, his words a puff of warm air at Jin’s ear, and then Jin was being carefully dragged somewhere, his legs only half following the situation and painfully stumbling forward.

He wanted to wake up all over again—with Kame still snuggled up close to him, and Mummies tearing his body open nothing but a very bad dream.

 

**

 

Jin didn’t know how long he had been drifting in and out of feverish consciousness. He was vaguely aware of people talking around him. There were names and arguments, voices filled with worries. He hadn’t heard so many different voices since he and Ryo had left the Zone. The city was so empty and quiet, and suddenly all those new voices were too much.

Once or twice he thought he had heard Kame, maybe even felt a hand holding his, but his brain had been too fuzzy to give his body instructions to move and squeeze back, or even open his eyes and see if Kame’s presence hadn’t been happening only in his head.

Every time he came to, he willed his eyes to open and his brain to stay conscious.

Then, after countless tries and fails, it finally worked.

He managed to stay conscious for longer than a few seconds. Opening eyes still felt like a battle he couldn’t win, and after a while he simply stopped trying, each attempt draining too much strength that he should use in other way.

The pain in his leg had morphed into a constant low ache with occasional twitching. It could be either a sign of healing, or things getting worse.

Jin assumed he wouldn’t be lying on a comfortable bed and fed on regular basis if things were getting worse. If _he_ was getting worse. As in—if he was becoming a Mummy.

Every now and then someone entered the room he was in, a quiet place with the only noise coming from a machine standing by his bed; checked on his vitals and whatever was happening with his leg, and then Jin was all alone again.

He didn’t like being alone.

Being alone opened too much room for intrusive thoughts that scared him. Whenever he was left alone for a longer period of time, or for time he thought was longer, he couldn’t ditch a nagging feeling that his body was less and less his own. He was going crazy. Losing his mind.

Sometimes he heard Ryo’s voice, or he believed it was Ryo’s voice. Loud and worried, impatiently asking questions and demanding answers and explanations. Jin would love to hear a few of those himself, but he was in no shape to ask.

With time, the pieces of conversations around him were slowly starting to make sense; sounds had become words and words formed sentences. When the fog clogging Jin’s head cleared away, Jin could recognize about four different voices. One of them was unambiguously Ryo’s, and another one, a voice belonging to a woman who seemed to be in charge of Jin’s treatment, often patiently answered Ryo’s questions. Judging by the annoyed snide almost always present in Ryo’s speech, it seemed Ryo didn’t like the answers much.

“It’s not getting better. Why is it not getting better?” Ryo was speaking somewhere close; standing by Jin’s left side.

On Jin’s right, a warm hand was holding his.

_Kame._

The less Kame spoke, the more palpable, unmistakable, his presence was, as strange as it seemed.

Even in his fitful sleep full of disturbing images of himself with pale, shrunken skin and a limp, Jin was aware of Kame’s closeness. When he became conscious, the feeling of Kame not leaving his side morphed into a tickling sensation of Kame holding his hand, smoothing his skin with a thumb. Maybe it was a good sign, maybe Kame touching him meant his skin hadn’t wrinkled yet. He was still human.

Jin desperately wanted to stay one.

“Tell me!” Ryo demanded. “The cut is still raw. Shouldn’t it be, like, I don’t know, clogging by now?”

Jin tried to switch his focus on his leg. The muscle spasmed, and the bandage lightly wrapped around it rubbed against flesh, shooting pain into the very tips of his fingers.

Someone walked over and stopped close to Ryo. A female voice, the doctor, said with obvious worry, “Frankly, it’s not the cut I’m worried about. It’s what caused it. Look at the tissue around here.” Hands touched Jin’s leg, pulled the bandage away, and Jin couldn’t stop a pained moan once cool air brushed the open wound. Kame’s hand held tighter. “See? I can try and carefully remove all this here, but I’m afraid the infection has already spread. It may be just a matter of time before the symptoms show.”

_Symptoms…_

No. No, no, _no_.

And Ryo must have gotten the message, too. “By ‘symptoms’ you mean…”

“That’s exactly what I mean. I’m sorry. Bringing your friend here was extremely irresponsible. Ueda said you wouldn’t have left without him, and I assured him it was the right thing to do. We don’t give up on people.” She sighed. “By bringing him here, we exposed the whole community to a great danger. I don’t want to scare you, I just feel like I should prepare you for the possibility—”

“You said you run research here,” Ryo cut her off.

Jin was grateful for the timing. He wasn’t ready to hear about the ‘possibility’. Not just yet.

“My research is nowhere near finished and without a working antidote, we can’t keep a potential threat down here.”

“He’s not a threat, goddammit. He’s my _friend_!” Ryo groaned. “Just make the fucking antidote. You are a scientist and have a whole fucking laboratory here!”

“It’s not so easy. We have the original research notes, but without the original tissue samples, we can’t do anything. The material we gathered from the Mummies is useless when we can’t replicate—”

“There has to be a way! Kame, say something. Tell her there has to be a way!”

A hand brushed hair off Jin’s forehead. Jin didn’t think he was feverish, not anymore which was weird and he was beginning to worry; and most of the time Kame’s hand holding his was warm, but the fingers felt cold against his face. It was strange and he shivered.

Then he felt something else, a soft sensation on his forehead, different from the touch of Kame’s fingertips. Kame’s lips pressed to his skin, and then moved, forming words whispered low against his forehead. “I’ll make it right again. I’m sorry.” And before Jin could have understood, Kame was straightening and standing up. “Doctor Kuroki?”

“I really wish there were something I could do, but I’m afraid—”

“With the original tissue… would you be able to make the antidote and save him?” Kame asked.

“Kame?” On Jin’s left, the obvious strain in Ryo’s voice gave Jin shivers. Something was wrong.

“Doctor Nakami left detailed notes that my predecessor was able to complete years ago. Her research must have been unbelievable. Truly remarkable. I’d give anything to have a chance to… Too bad it all ended in such a tragedy.” Doctor Kuroki sighed, her words making little to no sense to Jin. “To answer your question, yes. With the original tissue, I’d be able to make the antidote. In theory, of course. There’s no original tissue anymore.”

Jin felt like someone had sucked all air out of his lungs.

He might not understood much of what the doctor was saying, but one thing was clear—no antidote.

And his leg wasn’t getting better.

Would they have to kill him eventually? Or would they just toss him outside and set him free to roam the streets like the others… like the Mummies?

Acid taste of bile rushed up into Jin’s throat.

“Maybe I could help with that,” Kame said after a while; Jin heard him say—and then the buzz was back in Jin’s head and he was feeling sick, his head spun around and the rest of the words got lost in the fizzle of his own blood.

 

**

 

“Did it work?”

“We need to wait, give the antidote time to flow through his system and clear off the virus. There’s no saying in how long it may take.”

“But it _will_ work, right?”

“The tests we ran indicate the treatment should be positive.”

“ _Should be?_ SHOULD BE? You don’t know it for sure? You just injected my best friend with… _something_ , and you don’t know if it works?”

“No one has ever had a chance to try this, Ryo. All we had until today were doctor Nakami’s research notes. We couldn’t—”

“What if he gets worse? You have no idea what the effects might be. What if he—”

“So loud,” Jin croaked, his throat dry. The voices around him became clearer. Ryo and the doctor from before—Jin knew he had heard the name but couldn’t remember.

“—JIN!” With an excited cry, Ryo threw himself across the room and onto Jin’s bed, pressing Jin into the mattress not so gently with the weight of his body. “How are you feeling? Are you alright? Do you feel different? Geez, I was so worried! I didn’t know what to do and the bite looked so fucking _bad_. You asshole! Please don’t do anything stupid like that again.”

“Still loud,” Jin groaned, this time with a chuckle somewhere between the lines.

Ryo was crushing him, giving no signs of intending to pull away any time soon. It just showed how worried he truly must have been. It made Jin wonder how long exactly he had been out of it. He had lost the sense of time the moment he had woken up with Kame in the library and had been torn so violently from what might have been, if not disturbed, quite a peaceful morning. The last thing he remembered clearly was the horror in Kame’s voice when he had told Jin the figure watching them from the doorway hadn’t been Ryo. Everything from there on was a fuzzy hustle and pain, a mix of voices and images Jin wasn’t sure were real, or just a fabrication of his infected brain—

God, the infection.

Pulling his rusty focus from Ryo fussing all over him and squeezing him so tight the next treatment Jin might need soon would be one for broken ribs, Jin tried to relax his body and feel his leg. It still hurt, his leg below the knee throbbed. This must have been the exact reason why once upon a time someone had invented painkillers.

Besides being excruciating, however, the pain felt— _normal_.

He didn’t have a feeling something was trying to eat him alive anymore. Neither did the wound burn as it had before. Like having been consumed by an invisible flame that had been preventing it from closing up. The weird, unnatural feeling was gone.

Jin felt dizzy and had some trouble breathing, but both could have been easily put down on Ryo crushing his ribcage.

“Can’t breathe,” Jin wheezed, gasping on his last breath.

That did it. The weight was lifted off him, allowing his chest to raise freely, and with a little difficulty Jin sucked in a long breath.

“Sorry, geez, sorry, I just…” Ryo looked somewhere over his shoulder. “He’s gonna be fine now, right?”

“Let me check. Jin? How are you feeling?” The voice Jin had learnt to associate with the female doctor was finally given a matching body. A young woman dressed in a white lab coat emerged from behind Ryo. Dark hair was tied back in a loose ponytail and a pair of thick framed glasses sat on her small nose. She was pretty without trying. Her look might have been gentle, caring, had it not been for the professional streak shining in her eyes.

Jin frowned, assessing his condition once again, only this time trying to sense other things, too, not just the relief of the absence of the burn chewing on his rotting flesh. The memory came back to him with a disgustingly vivid mental image of wobbling Mummies, and Jin made a face.

He cleared his throat. “Like something tried to eat me but I kicked it off.” His own voice sounded strange to him, but it must have been only due to the raw, sore throat and lack of use recently—that brought him back to the question about how long he had been unconscious this time.

“You could say that’s exactly what happened,” the doctor said, reaching out for Jin’s hand, holding it and pressing her thumb to his inner wrist to check the pulse.

“Really?”

“Your friends found you just in time to save you from being eaten. And brought you here.”

“Where…?”

Ryo bounced at the other side of the bed. “We found them, Jin. The Moles!” He glanced up to meet the doctor’s eyes. “I was studying the map all night and it was right there, all those signs we had seen before, they led us where they were supposed to. They are scientists, _of course_ they would be somewhere close to the university. I needed to see for myself so I left the library—”

Jin shot him a sharp, reprimanding glare.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. No splitting and shit. But I needed to see if I was right. I went a little back to the train station we had passed just outside the campus, and that’s where I found Ueda. I told him about us, and about you and the library, and that I had to go back there to get you.” Ryo bit his lip. “When we got there, though, I ran into Kame and he was upset, and—fuck, Jin! How could you? What the fuck, were you trying to play a _fucking_ hero?” A fist sharply connected with Jin’s shoulder. Jin winced. “Remember the things we promised to never do? Getting eaten by fucking Mummies was _right_ on the top of the list!”

At the next attempt to hit Jin, Ryo’s hand was stopped halfway by the doctor’s hand. “That’s enough. I’m sure Jin understands you were worried.”

“WORRIED?” Ryo gasped. “That doesn’t even begin to cover what I felt when I saw _all_ those fucking monsters clawing at him!”

“I’m sorry, Ryo,” Jin said, voice hoarse, and he meant it.

Ryo nodded, sniffing and holding back tears, because damn it if he was going to cry, not now when there was no reason to anymore.

“Ueda burnt them all, and also the whole building,” Ryo said instead. “Not fair to the books, but if it’s the cost of getting rid of fucking Mummies, I’ll take it. Then I forced Ueda and a few others that came with us to take you back here.” Jin had a vague memory of being present during that argument. “Ueda said it wasn’t safe because you had been bitten and everything, but I swear I was ready to kick his ass if he had tried to stop me.”

“He followed the rules we have around here, that’s all,” the doctor noted. “You must understand.” She finally let go of Jin’s hand, apparently pleased with the quick heartbeat check, and proceeded to walk around the bed to take down the bandage around Jin’s leg. Jin watched her every move cautiously, a part of him still dreading the moment the bandage would be off.

“Whatever,” Ryo snorted. “Turned out taking you here was the right thing to do— _of course_ it was—because now you’re fine and the leg is healing. It _is_ healing, right? Doctor Kuroki?”

“Doctor Kuroki, that’s your name,” Jin repeated, remembering hearing the name before.

“She saved you,” Ryo informed him.

“Thank you. However you did it, thank you.”

Did it mean there had been some kind of a cure all along? Why hadn’t it been used globally yet? Did the government in the Zone know about it?

So many questions suddenly popped up on Jin’s mind. He wanted to ask doctor Kuroki about all of them. Preferably right now. All at once.

She glanced up. “I’m Meisa. And I’m the doctor here. Well, one of the doctors. But I wasn’t the one saving you. That was your friend.”

Instinctively, Jin’s head turned to Ryo.

Ryo shook his head, giving Jin a ‘don’t look at me’ look.

Meisa replaced the bandage and smoothed it over Jin’s leg, then helped Jin rest the weakened limb back on the top of a soft, fluffy pillow arranged on the bed.

“He’s waiting outside. “ She smiled. “I’ll go get him, tell him you’re awake. He can tell you himself.”

Ignoring Jin’s confusion, Meisa walked away to the door, opened it, and slipped out of the room.

Jin looked at Ryo. “Kame?”

Stepping away from the bed, Ryo gave Jin the biggest grin. “You won’t believe it, Akanishi. You just won’t believe it.”

“What’s going on?”

Despite all the talking Ryo did before, or the tight grip he had held Jin with, like he might have never let go, Ryo was, surprisingly, quite fast in his retreat.

On his way out of the door, Ryo passed by Kame who was just entering the room. There was a fleeting glance of silent communication between the two of them, but Kame lowered his head before Jin could have understood what was the look about.

“Just tell him,” Ryo said and patted Kame’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be alright.”

Then Ryo was gone, and Jin and Kame were alone.

The hum of the machine standing by Jin’s bed was low, and slightly different from before. It wasn’t pumping mostly ineffective antibiotics into Jin’s system anymore, just monitoring his quickly progressing healing process.

Jin felt better. Much better.

With every breath, he was feeling more himself again, and less a victim of whatever had threatened to destroy him.

With only a little difficulty, Jin pushed himself higher on the pillow, into a comfortable half-sit. The wound on his leg throbbed at the strain; Jin bit his lip, but the corners of his lips curled up into a smile.

“Hi.”

Kame shuffled on his feet closer to the bed, looking anywhere but Jin. Like he was afraid of what he might see. “I’ve heard you’re feeling better. Meisa… Doctor Kuroki, said you’d heal and that the… the infection was gone.”

“Nothing but good news,” Jin grinned. “Kame.”

Hearing his name brought Kame’s head up, his eyes meeting Jin’s. Jin patted the empty space on the mattress by his side in an invitation Kame hesitantly accepted.

“Is it true? Should I be thanking you?”

Kame shook his head.

Jin reached out to touch his hand, hoping that whatever had happened while he had been unconscious hadn’t changed the things between the two of them. He didn’t want for his touch to startle Kame every time again, he didn’t want to go back to how things used to be in the beginning—mere weeks ago. It seemed so much longer than that.

“Meisa said— and Ryo, too…”

“They are wrong,” Kame mumbled, the shakes of his head becoming more jerky until he forced himself to stop and focus. “I didn’t… I’m glad you’re fine, though.”

Something was wrong; Jin could tell.

“Kame, talk to me.”

Kame chewed on his bottom lip, his hands pressed one into the other on his lap. Jin’s touch heavy. “Did they tell you? About the virus.”

“No one told me anything.” And Jin was really getting anxious about not knowing. So much must have happened while he had been losing consciousness and his brain had been fuzzy during the short periods of awareness. He squeezed Kame’s hand. “Will you?”

“What if I do and you won’t want to see me again? Jin, I’m so sorry! I knew they would find me.”

“Kame—”

“No. Jin, _listen_. Just listen to me.” Kame grabbed Jin’s hand. “Remember what Ryo said about the virus?”

Dozens of Ryo’s theories flashed through Jin’s mind, one more ridiculous than the other. “Ryo said a lot of things.”

“He said it’s not terrestrial.”

“Alright, _that one_.” Ryo’s imagination had no boundaries, Jin had to give him that. “And you are telling me—?”

“Ryo was right.”

“ _Aliens?_ ” Jin gasped. Surprisingly the idea of aliens didn’t sound as ridiculous as it might have—with Mummies roaming freely in the streets across the world, anything might be possible. Including aliens being behind all of that. “Aliens did this? Well, gotta say an alien invasion wasn’t on the top of the list of what I considered.”

He was always more inclined to the theory about bioterrorism of some kind.

That’s what he’d grown up with. The leaders in the Zone told scary stories about the world powers trying to destroy each other and as a result destroying everything. The rest of humanity needed to survive. Stand back and hide behind walls. Post-apocalyptic propaganda. And a false one, above all.

Aliens—well.

“It wasn’t an invasion!” Kame jumped up on his feet and stepped back, away from the bed. “They didn’t want to hurt anyone. They crashed and sought help, but instead were locked up and killed!” Kame’s voice gradually escalated under a rush of emotions. What had started as an irritated snap had quickly grown into an explosion. Kame shook all over, his hands balled up into fists. “They didn’t mean to hurt anyone!”

“Kame, Kame… Kame. Calm down. I didn’t—“ The leg hurt when Jin moved, pain shooting up his knee, thigh, and hip, and making him wince, but he was too restless to lie in bed. Kame paced around the room, upset and mumbling something Jin didn’t understand. Jin moved over to the edge of the bed, lowered his leg, but didn’t get any further. The pain was too much, his muscles shifted around the cut, and Jin held his breath not to cry out. “Shit. Kame, what’s going on? I’m sorry.”

And he wanted to be. Even if he wasn’t yet sure what to be sorry about.

Kame’s distress immediately gained priority over alien infections and Jin’s near death experience only a couple of hours ago. Cursing the pain, Jin wished nothing but to be able to walk over to Kame and hug him. And this time he wouldn’t care about Kame pushing him away for one weak reason or another.

“ _Kame._ ”

“I’m sorry it all happened and that I didn’t say something earlier, but Hitomi always warned me not to say anything and that my life depended on keeping it secret, but you were _dying_ and I couldn’t… I couldn’t let that happen. You said you’d do anything to keep me safe, so I thought… I wanted to do the same. Save you. And I— I will understand if you don’t want me around anymore. I told doctor Kuroki I’d leave, but I’m not sure she will let me. Not now when she knows. I’m sorry.”

“Wait, wait. What secret? What didn’t you tell me? Kame, please. I don’t care what’s going on. And you are not leaving, goddammit. Remember, this is what we wanted, right? Find the Moles, be safe. Start over. Have a home.” Jin didn’t hesitate. He meant every word. “Please. Just, sit down and talk to me.”

For a moment nothing indicated Kame would do as Jin asked him.

The bandage pulled on Jin’s skin, winding tighter around his shin when he carefully lowered it to the floor to sit on the edge of the bed, making space for Kame next to him.

Then Kame warily moved, and with eyes glued to the floor shuffled his feet back to Jin. He took a seat on the bed, leaving room between himself and Jin.

“Doctor Kuroki extracted the antidote from my blood,” Kame said quietly, letting out a long yielding sigh.

Jin frowned, slow to catch up. “How?”

Kame pressed his lips into a thin line.

_“With the original tissue, I’d be able to make the antidote.”_

And…

_“There’s no original tissue anymore.”_

Jin’s eyes flickered all over Kame’s face.

And then—

_“Maybe I could help with that.”_

Fuzzy memories of his rare lucid moments of the previous days were slowly coming to him and even though the logical half of his brain was about to scream, the residual pain in his leg reminded him that logic had vanished from the world outside the moment the infection had broken out.

“You are…?” Jin sucked in a breath. “But— how?”

Kame rubbed his hands against his thighs. “My family came here long before I was born. After the crash they were contained and taken someplace, Hitomi called it ‘quarantine’. She said they were never allowed to leave.”

In Jin’s memories, ‘quarantine’ wasn’t a good thing. It was a place where people disappeared. Kame’s parents wouldn’t have been the first, and they had definitely not been the last.

When Jin was four, maybe five, an exhausted and clearly terrified old couple had knocked on the Zone gate. Kids had been curious as always, even more because it hadn’t happened every day that there were newcomers anymore. People who had survived the outbreak had sought safety in the Zones in the first months. New arrivals in the later years were rare—and suspicious. Guards had taken them away, to a _quarantine_ , they had said. Jin had never heard of those people again. A rumor had spread the guy had arrived with an injury and had died.

It might have been even true. But the more Jin thought about it, though, the less he believed anything that had been ever said inside the Zone walls.

The couple had been probably killed in the end.

At some point the leaders in the Central Tokyo Zone had simply stopped trusting _anything_ that had come from the outside.

Kame pressed his balled up fists into the edge of the mattress at both sides. “They lived in a place that was half a home and half a prison. They never saw much of the outside, even though they didn’t want to hurt anyone. My… my mother learnt the language, but no one believed her words anyway. People were afraid. Then I was born and things just… When it was decided that my family should be… taken care of—”

“Killed.”

“Yes.” Kame shivered, and Jin wanted to slap himself for being blunt. “Hitomi took me away. My mother asked her to do it. Hitomi was a friend. She ran the project, monitoring my family to see if they were dangerous, but she never agreed with the ways the authorities wanted to do things. They came to a conclusion that we were a threat. Something in our blood is toxic to cells in the human body.” Kame glanced up. “It’s like… like a safety fuse. It’s not _always_ dangerous, at least that’s what doctor Kuroki says now. I wasn’t sure, but she ran tests. The toxin was released only because… because…”

Jin nodded. “Because they were—”

“Killed. Yes.”

Jin didn’t know what to say. In a way, it all sounded like the kind of action the people in the Zone would take. Too scared of the unknown and ready to take extreme measures in order to protect themselves. Like killing people who sought retreat. Like never leaving an area spanning only a few blocks and being ready to shoot anyone who would try. Like having control over _everything_ people did, from sleep schedule and food distribution to procreation and relationships.

The Zoners would set off for a damn witch hunt already for the little Kame had shared with Jin. No questions asked.

They wouldn’t care Kame was innocent and in as much danger as everyone else, maybe even more, actually.

Hell, they would probably demanded Jin’s head now, too. He had been attacked by the Mummies, had been infected—and now had an alien blood in his veins. The Zoners would never let him walk back through the gate, even if he wanted to for some reason.

Good thing he didn’t want to go back.

Jin had always thought humanity had changed after the breakout to accommodate. He had only a vague idea of what the world looked like before, but he wanted to believe it must have been different. People must have become tough, sometimes cruel, in order to survive, right? Now he wasn’t so sure anymore.

Maybe it wasn't the Mummies Kame should be protected from, after all.

Jin thought of all those moments he had promised Kame just that—he had nearly died to keep his word.

He would still protect Kame from now on. Only their enemy had changed.

“The thing in your blood…” Jin hesitated, shifted his hand down to the empty space between them, then changed his mind and wanted to slide the hand back. Maybe he got it all wrong and Kame’s faithfully kept distance all this time had also other reasons. Kame just said he hadn’t known his blood wasn’t always dangerous. Maybe all that time he had been just trying to protect Jin. But _maybe_ Jin had made it all up and seen what he wanted to see. Wanted for Kame to want him back. His fingers tingled. Then Kame’s hand met him halfway, warm palm covering Jin’s hand and holding it, stopping it from disappearing. Jin’s gaze sharpened on Kame, flicking between his eyes and their connected hands lying on the bed. Something in Jin broke and he pushed most of the unwanted worries away. He hoped he understood Kame’s gesture right. “That’s why you didn’t want to kiss me.”

“I was afraid of hurting you. I didn’t know how the protein in my blood works, and I thought that maybe…” Kame shook his head, dark hair falling down and covering half of his face. He was trying to hide. He was admitting he was different and was afraid Jin might see the difference in his face. He was afraid Jin might never see anything else but how different Kame was from there on. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I would’ve never forgiven myself. But then I left you there with _them_ because I was scared and I wasn’t thinking, and when you said ‘run’, I did… and you got hurt anyway. I’m so sorry, Jin, I didn’t want to…” Kame was struggling with words, explaining and apologizing at once, and he was quickly getting frustrated because words didn’t flow out of his mouth the way he wanted. “There wasn’t even so many of them, but they got you—and it’s my fault.”

“How could it possibly be your fault?”

Jin wanted nothing but to assure Kame there was _nothing_ about all of it that could have possibly happened because of something he had done wrong, but first, he needed to understand what exactly Kame believed to be his fault.

A short, ragged laugher rasped deep in Kame’s throat. “Do you need a list of reasons? I could think of a few.”

“Do tell.”

Cautiously measuring his every move, Kame looked up, his eyes wide in bewilderment. Whatever his head had told him, whatever bad scenario he had convinced himself to expect, it obviously wasn’t happening. Jin wasn’t pushing him away, wasn’t disgusted by what Kame was, or angry because Kame hadn’t told him earlier. Jin wasn’t blaming Kame for anything. And Kame wasn’t ready for that, didn’t know how to accept such development of the situation.

“It’s in _my_ blood. The thing that changed them, turned them into those monsters.”

This reason Jin expected to hear. “The people who killed your family are responsible for that one, Kame. Not you. It was their fault the toxin got into the air.”

Kame must have known that. Somewhere deep inside must have known, but with everything happening out there, with the whole world having turned into hell, rationality wasn’t exactly the leading concept of the day.

“They can smell me,” Kame continued, and Jin could only hope his words hadn’t gone completely unnoticed. “That’s how they found us. They were after me. I know you don’t believe me—”

“I may have changed my mind about that one, actually.”

A flash of smile flicked across Kame’s otherwise too serious face. “I don’t know what exactly they want. Back then when she was running tests on my parents, Hitomi found their cells could recognize each other. Like some sort of magnetism. And later, when… after everything had happened, and they found us in our first home, she began to suspect the process didn’t stop with my family dying. Whatever spread in human bodies and changed them is still alive enough to be pulled to me.”

“Hitomi is… was doctor Nakami, right?” Jin asked. “She’s the one whose research notes helped save my life. Doctor Kuroki mentioned the name and I… She and your parents must have been close.”

Kame nodded. “She wanted to save all of them. When she learnt what her superiors wanted to do, she wanted to get my family into safety, but there wasn’t enough time.”

“And they wouldn’t have stopped chasing them.” With difficulties, Jin moved to face Kame better. His leg was screaming against such ideas and he knew it would be for the best to rest it on the pillow again, but Kame was now blocking the space Jin needed for moving, and Kame was Jin’s priority. Instead, Jin bit back a whimper, ignoring Kame’s alarmed look. “Look, I don’t know much about how things worked before the breakout. However, I do know how the government in the Zone deals with potentially dangerous situations, and let me tell you, it’s not nice. Most people living behind the wall rather close their eyes or turn their heads, because they _want_ to believe it’s done for their good.”

“Not all of them, though.”

“Not all of them,” Jin agreed.

Kame’s eyes dropped to the injured leg that was now awkwardly hanging down over the edge of the bed, too weak for Jin to hold it in horizontal position like he likely should have.

“I shouldn’t have left you there alone,” Kame said quietly. “I shouldn’t have let you push me away.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You couldn’t know what would happen. _I_ didn’t know what would happen. I wasn’t thinking. An alarm rang in my head and all I wanted to do was protect those I care about.”

Kame sucked his lower lip in his mouth.

He felt oddly exposed under Jin’s intent stare, fighting with himself against the pull to look up and meet Jin’s eyes. Then he did.

“I’m not like you.”

Jin laughed. “Good. I don’t want someone like me. I don’t think I would be able to tolerate someone like me. I still don’t understand how Ryo has managed to stand me all these years.”

“You know what I mean.” Kame fidgeted uncomfortably.

“Look at me.” The soft laughter from before trailed off, replaced with the serious yet gentle commanding tone Jin had used on several occasions before, whenever he needed Kame to do what was necessary.

Just like before, Kame’s reaction was immediate. His head sprang up.

Jin went for a kind smile, not sure he pulled it off, but Kame seemed to relax some, so Jin allowed himself to do the same. He brought a hand up to Kame’s face, touching his cheek and having Kame tilt his head ever so slightly into the warm palm.

Kame licked his lips, uncertainty flicking in his eyes. Just like a moment ago he had wanted to look up but hadn’t dared, now he wanted to look away more than anything. Only his eyes were glued to Jin’s face.

Jin’s thumb brushed Kame’s cheek, feeling the soft skin. “You are not different. Not where it matters.”

“Would you… Do you still want to kiss me? Now when you know what I am?”

The finger gently stroking Kame’s cheek moved slowly to touch his lips. In response Kame parted his lips just a bit.

“More than anything,” Jin said truthfully.

 

**

 

The base was huge, and Jin hadn’t yet seen all of it. He spent the morning hobbling around as Ryo and a guy their age who had introduced himself as Yamapi, showed him the core of what the Moles had seized as their property. Jin quickly understood not everything being told about the Moles was necessarily true. They didn’t live just underground, even though the name enticed to such conclusion. The base took up miles of tunnels stretched between at least four stations, and three buildings in near proximity, one of them several floors tall.

They had electricity and, as Ryo had informed Jin at the first chance, warm running water. As soon as Jin was sure his leg wouldn’t betray him, he tried for himself. Having a spray of hot water fall down on his head was a luxury Jin never really hoped for, and now once he had it, a part of him knew it might be impossible to leave. Even if he planned to.

Ryo wasn’t trying to hide his excitement and decision to stay, and Jin suspected the whole tour was to push Jin into coming to the same decision.

Not much pushing was necessary.

Jin spent the morning in awe.

His leg was bothering him only when he was walking up or down the stairs, but with one hand on the railing and Ryo supporting him from the other side, moving between floors wasn’t an impossible task. In fact, after the few days he had been forced to stay in bed, moving around was a much welcomed change for someone who was used to being on the move all his life.

Two of the buildings were turned into apartments that could accommodate most of the people living in the community, while the third one housed laboratories and common rooms. Jin hadn’t seen even a half of it all yet.

Yamapi was fun to be around, and Jin quickly understood Ryo had already spent some time in the company of the guy. The two of them joked about things Jin hardly understood. Apparently, quite a lot of people regularly gathered in one of the common rooms for a night of karaoke, and Ryo had joined the last one two days ago. He certainly sounded like he had had a blast and had every intention to drag Jin along the next time.

Jin heard himself agree and Ryo seemed satisfied with the response.

They ate lunch in the canteen, a busy place on the second floor of the tallest building. Yamapi referred to it as Block B, shortly explaining it was the second building that had been adjusted for housing, while Block A was mostly occupied by laboratories. It used to be a part of the university campus and after the collapse hadn’t been abandoned for long. The first group of survivors, that had later become the core of the Moles, had moved in and eventually started with a research based on the notes taken by professor Nakami.

During the lunch, people stopped by their table to greet Yamapi, some of them already knew Ryo as well. Judging by the curious glances Jin was getting without trying to draw attention, most of those random passers-by approached the table simply to find out more about the new guy.

“They will get used to it,” Yamapi said, noticing that Jin had come to the obvious conclusion. “Doesn’t happen everyday to see new faces around.”

Jin took a big bite of his burger, nodding. He certainly hoped Yamapi was right. All the attention was making him twitchy. Like he had done something wrong and everyone was out there to judge him. The taste of real, _fresh_ meat exploded on his palate, and it took all the self-control Jin could muster not to moan aloud. Worries about people watching him momentarily forgotten. Freeze-dried meat had kept him alive and more or less nutritioned, but it could never stand a chance against a freshly made burger.

Civilization was truly a wonderful thing.

“Most people would shit themselves at the thought of leaving the Zone.” Yamapi shrugged, watching Jin stuff his face with amusement.

“Their loss,” Jin muttered with his mouth full. “God, this is good.”

Yamapi burst into a fit of spontaneous laughter. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so close to an orgasm over a burger.”

“Wait until he tries chocolate. Or coffee.” Ryo grinned. “Jin, seriously. They have coffee that doesn’t taste like dirt. You will love it. I wanted to sneak you some to the infirmary but Meisa said you needed all the sleep you could have gotten, and she’s kind of scary when she switches on the doctor mode.”

Jin’s eyebrows twitched. “Doctor mode?”

“Yeah, she’s really good at that,” Yamapi nodded. He shook his overgrown bangs down his forehead and gave Jin what probably should have been his best stern look. It looked nothing like any expression Jin had noticed in doctor Kuroki’s face, but he didn’t comment on that.

Had Ryo recognized Jin’s doubts, he said nothing.

Jin didn’t miss the look the two of them briefly exchanged though. Being around other people clearly raised Ryo’s spirit. All the searching for the Moles and Ryo’s verve to seek the signs and not relent even during the times the whole mission had seemed lost, hadn’t been only about finding a safe place. Ryo had missed company. There would always be a special bond between him and Jin—with everything they had been through, it couldn’t be any different, anyway; but Ryo needed more than just Jin.

Just like Jin needed more than Ryo’s company.

The thought made him fidget in his seat, and eat his burger a little faster.

With all the walking they had done today, with all the things and places he had been showed, there was one thing, one person, Jin wanted to see more than anything.

Kame.

Jin wanted to see Kame and wanted to stop the tip-toeing they had had going on between them for way too long. Looking back, Jin now did understand why Kame had kept his distance during the weeks after they had met. Now, however, there was no need for that anymore.

It had been two days since Jin had seen Kame the last time. Doctor Kuroki—Meisa—had explained she needed to run more tests and that Kame had agreed to cooperate in any way she saw fit. Jin didn’t know the doctor well enough to trust her words, and he was naturally suspicious, even though she seemed sincere and harmless.

He swallowed the last mouthful of his food and washed it down with a glass of soda. “Are we done here?”

“You tell me,” Ryo smirked.

His and Yamapi’s portions had been half the size of what Jin had ordered, and both of them had finished eating a while ago.

Jin gave Ryo a sharp glare. “I bet you didn’t leave here for two days at first.”

“You won’t ever know.”

“Something like that,” Yamapi jumped in.

“Hey, you didn’t have to tell him,” Ryo pouted, and picked at the edge of the table.

Jin laughed. “He didn’t need to.” With his unhurt leg, he kicked Ryo under the table. “I know you.”

Ryo didn’t kick back only because he couldn’t aim right and he would have felt badly had he accidentally hit Jin where the wound was healing. “Whatever. Can we go?”

“Yes. I’m not eating another burger, if that’s what you are asking.” Maneuvering as carefully as he could, Jin pushed his chair off the table and stood up. His injured leg was still weak, but there was no sign of the infection and the cut was healing just fine. He had asked Meisa so many times that at some point she had stopped answering and just glared. If it had anything to do with her doctor mode, Jin couldn’t tell.

People still stared at them as they made their way to the exit.

Jin wondered how much they knew. About him. And about Kame.

Had Meisa told everyone who they had welcomed in their community? What if Kame’s folks had been right all along and keeping Kame’s true identity secret was the only way to keep him safe?

Jin cursed his leg on his next step. He was in no shape to protect Kame. He let out an irritated grunt that Yamapi mistook for a sound of exhaustion.

“I think it’s time to show you your room.”

Jin turned sharply to Ryo, seeking confirmation. “My room?”

“Unless you want to return to the infirmary…”

“No way!” Jin might have sounded bordering desperate. One more night spent on the hospital bed and he would be just about ready to throw himself into a horde of Mummies. Maybe not. “I’m glad I’m out of there. And I’m sure Meisa would agree with me.”

“In that case we have a room ready for you.”

“I’m sure you’ll love it.” Something in Ryo’s tone told Jin they weren’t telling him everything.

Whatever worry about his new quarters he might have had was gone the moment he entered the door. The room was simple and equipped with only the basic furniture, but it was still the biggest luxury Jin had ever seen, let alone slept in. It was clean, dry, and nice, didn’t smell of mold and years of dereliction. A big window took up most of the width of the opposite wall, opening the room into a park outside. Unlike the inside, the park didn’t seem to be taken care of any time recently, but it wasn’t a jungle either.

Ryo pushed him further into the room. On the left a small kitchen counter stretched along the wall, a table with three chairs stood in the middle, and who cared that each chair was different. On the right there was a neatly made double bed with small clean crates serving as bedside tables. On one of them Jin noticed a book, and his first instinct was to glance over at Ryo in hope to get an explanation.

He met Ryo’s grin.

“I think Kame wanted to get you some flowers as a welcome home surprise, but nothing much blooms anymore in this season. And Meisa may’ve locked him in the lab—” The moment the words were out, Ryo must have realized the possible double meaning, and his eyes went wide. “Not like _that_!”

Jin released a shaky exhale.

“She’s not holding him against his will,” Ryo quickly clarified. “Just calm down, he’s in no danger here. Neither of us is. I _told_ you. The Moles are the good guys.”

Behind Ryo, Yamapi listened to the exchange in silence. When Jin’s eyes flicked up to him, Yamapi offered an assuring smile. “Kame offered his help. They are working on a vaccine. We should be able to stop and revert the infection up to the second stage soon.”

In theory, Jin knew Kame had offered his help. However, he still didn’t quite like the idea of Kame in a lab.

Jin ran a hand along the edge of the bed, the sheets soft under his fingers. It was such a strange feeling. Nothing Jin had ever touched in his life, not even back in the Zone, had felt so nicely against his skin. He wasn’t much aware of the bed in the infirmary; he’d been occupied with worrying about his life.

“Can I see him?” Jin straightened up, looking at Ryo and Yamapi.

Yamapi nodded. “Kame? Sure.”

Tension Jin hadn’t been aware of a moment ago was now very clearly leaving his shoulders. Every day he hadn’t seen Kame was slowly coiling a noose of anxiety around his guts, and he had sort of believed Kame would be the first person waiting for him after being released from the infirmary. Instead, Ryo had been the one bursting into the door and dragging Jin along for sightseeing.

“Can I see him now?” Jin clarified.

Ryo snorted, but stepped aside and waved his hand towards the door. “Be my guest.”

“And here I thought the room would keep him interested for a while,” Yamapi said, leaning towards Ryo and nudging his shoulder with his own.

“Not a chance.”

They caught up with Jin who was moving as fast as he could towards the staircase. Ryo hurried to help Jin, supporting his weight on the way downstairs.

“You like your room though, right?” Ryo asked.

Jin carefully placed his injured leg on the next step. The stupid Mummy had not only infected him in the library, but had bitten out a chunk of his calf muscle. Meisa told him it would heal just fine now when the infection had been taken care of, but the healing process might be slow. She also joked about no marathons for Jin in the future, but really, Jin wasn’t planning any. In the safety of the Moles’ base, with Ryo and Kame, Jin had no reason to leave the place and expose himself to the dangers lurking in the streets outside anymore.

He’d been running from Mummies most of his life. He was done running now.

Ryo had found them a place to stay.

“You kidding? This place is great.” Jin gave his friend a wide grin. “I’ll take sharing a bed with you over spending another night on a dirty floor anytime.”

“What?” Ryo’s voice jumped in consternation. “No way!” Gesturing widely, Ryo let go of Jin’s arm, sending Jin into a slight stagger as he did his best to balance himself.

“But…?” Jin glanced over his shoulder, past Yamapi following them, back to the hallway they’d come from. “The room just now—”

“That’s yours and Kame’s, you creep,” Ryo laughed, relieved. “I moved in with Yamapi because he had an empty bed. Kame told them to put the two of you in the same room.”

“Kame— _what_?”

Ryo rolled his eyes. “He’s totally into you, Akanishi. And you’ve been staring at him like a lovesick puppy from the beginning. Don’t you think I didn’t notice your morning cuddles.”

“That’s not—” But honestly, Jin didn’t have anything to prove Ryo wrong. Maybe ‘lovesick puppy’ was a bit too strong word to put it, but the fact was that Jin _had been_ eyeing Kame from day one.

He just didn’t expect Kame would make a step to meet Jin halfway.

They hadn’t even kissed yet. They hadn’t really talked about how things would be once Jin was free to go.

Kame hadn’t mentioned the shared room during any of his visits. It made Jin wonder just when Kame had made the arrangements. Was it before or after he’d admitted he wanted to kiss Jin?

“Don’t try that on me. I know you, too.”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Jin muttered.

Ryo shrugged. “Wouldn’t be his first secret, after all.”

He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t need to. Jin knew what was hidden behind those vague words.

Like he’d told Kame before, though, he didn’t care about who Kame was or where his parents had come from. Details. The important things were more present—a room Jin now shared with Kame because Kame wanted them to share it; Kame saving Jin’s life while possibly putting his own life and freedom in danger; the kiss Kame had everything but promised when they’d seen each other last time. There were so many things Jin had to look forward to—and so little to want to look back at.

“Does Kame know I’m out of the infirmary?”

Jin’s impatience made Ryo laugh. How could’ve Jin ever thought his interest in Kame was a secret was beyond Ryo’s understanding.

“Of course. He was up before dawn, asking about you, but you were sleeping and Meisa refused to wake you up. Said he would get to see you later anyway, and took Kame to the lab to distract him. Had it been up to him, he’d have spent the morning pacing back and forth in front of your door.”

An amused snort came from Yamapi.

As they reached the ground floor and headed down the connecting hallway, Jin recognized some of the spots he’d seen in the morning. He’d know how to find the canteen and his room, and a simple, hand-written poster hanging on a wall was inviting people for the karaoke night Ryo had promised to take Jin to.

Jin groaned when after rounding another corner a new wing of stairs appeared in front of them. Jin had asked about elevators before, but apparently keeping them running would’ve sucked too much energy the complex needed elsewhere. People got used to walking up and down the stairs, and those who couldn’t anymore, for one reason or another, were simply moved to lower floors.

Ryo and Yamapi accompanied Jin as far as the main lab door, Yamapi resuming his guide role from the morning and explaining what sort of work was done by the scientists behind each door they passed by. Jin hardly understood a half of it, but he doubted anyone expected him to. Laboratories and research were for people smart in fields Jin had no idea about. The people inside hadn’t spent their life fighting for life out there in the streets. Some of them might not survive if they were suddenly thrown into the wild. But Jin would—Jin had. And he’d gathered enough experience to be able to protect others, too.

He smiled, an idea slowly forming on his mind.

He _did_ have something to offer to the community.

If necessary, he could help keep them safe. The way he’d protected Kame. The way he and Ryo had made it all those years.

It was encouraging.

And then he opened the right door and was bathed with bright fluorescent light. The room was all white and steel, a stark contrast to everything Jin knew all his life. It smelled even more of chemicals and cleanness than had the room he’d stayed in while recovering.

Meisa was hovering over a microscope, long hair pulled back and her whole body strained with concentration. She was so focused on whatever she was doing that she didn’t hear the door opening or that someone had entered the room.

Jin looked around, seeking Kame.

He found him sitting on a simple, bare hospital bed, rolling down his sleeve over a wad of cotton pressed to the inside of his elbow. A few vials filled with blood were sitting in a stand on the table on his left.

Jin sucked in a breath, telling himself Kame wasn’t forced to do any of this. He was free to leave, but he stayed because he wanted to.

Kame’s head snapped up. “Jin!”

Leaving Ryo and Yamapi behind in the hallway, Jin was holding himself up with some difficulties, but he stood there, looking at Kame as if the rest of the lab didn’t exist.

Kame quickly tugged the sleeve down and stood up.

“No one told me you’re already out.”

“That’s because I may’ve been kidnapped by Ryo and Yamapi. They gave me a tour. Have you seen how big this place is?”

Kame nodded. “I’ve seen bits and pieces. Mostly the labs. And the dormitories.”

“You got us a room,” Jin said softly, once again overwhelmed by the reality behind the simple statement.

Kame shuffled his feet closer, yet still leaving way too much space between them. “I thought… But if you’d prefer your own place, or to stay with Ryo—”

“I’ve spent most of my life with him. And I don’t like being alone.”

Nodding again as Jin spoke, Kame shifted even closer. He bit his lip uncertainly. “I wasn’t sure… I don’t know if…” He sighed, clearly frustrated with himself and the lack of the right words to explain himself. Then he shook his head. “What if we kiss and you realize it’s not what you want?”

Somewhere in the room, in the space Jin had almost forgotten existed, Meisa cleared her throat. “If you excuse me, I’ll take the samples… somewhere.”

She was out of the door before Jin’s mind could’ve caught up with her attempt at subtlety.

Jin turned back to Kame. “That’s not going to happen.” He had never been more sure about anything in his life.

“But—”

Two wobbly steps, and Jin’s finger touching Kame’s lips stopped Kame from making up more excuses.

“I just know it, alright? I’ve wanted to be close to you and hold you from the moment I saw you in that damn, dark factory. And now, with the serum from your blood in my veins? I feel like I’m gravitating towards you and I can’t imagine not being around you.”

“I should tell Meisa she needs to figure out the magnetism in my blood cells,” Kame mumbled, his lips moving against the skin of Jin’s fingers. “I mean, if she really plans to give the serum to more people—”

“You should finally kiss me first,” Jin said before replacing his hand with his lips, gently pressing against Kame’s slightly parted in surprise ones.

The kiss was simple at first—but it felt like everything fell in place.

.the end

**Author's Note:**

> The song Jin and Kame dance to is C'est si bon by Chiemi Eri, in my head anyway. If you want to imagine another song it's up to you :)


End file.
